The Quiet Life of Severus Snape
by todisturbtheuniverse
Summary: In which Severus Snape's death is interrupted by an interfering Hermione Granger, and he harbors quiet animosity for the girl who forced him to live past the war.
1. Second Chances

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I don't believe in a stupid or clueless or furious Ron, so he won't be making much of an appearance in this fic—unless he has due cause for rage, of course. And I promise you won't have to put up with any romantic interaction between the two of them past the prologue, but I like keeping things as intact as possible from canon. These are J.K. Rowling's characters, not mine, and I'm just playing with them—keeping them as close to their original form as possible in the meantime, of course. We're going to pretend, for the sake of shits and giggles, that the epilogue never happened, and that dear Severus didn't meet his untimely end in the Shrieking Shack. Other than that, canon events remain intact. Happy reading!

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><p>ONE<p>

_Second Chances_

He woke to her anxious face, the purplish bruises under her eyes, the dried tear tracks glittering on her cheeks—clean paths that had cut through blood and grime.

He was not dead, and she was the reason.

"Granger," he croaked hoarsely, and fresh tears glazed her golden-brown eyes.

"Don't be furious," she choked past the first sob that shook her thin frame. She looked brutally unhealthy; she had, after all, been on the run for the better part of the year, eating only what she could scavenge, enduring injury, fleeing death. "Remus and Tonks and Colin and Fred and…and I couldn't just stand by and let you die, too, not if I could save you, just one person!" She struggled to bring herself under control, wiping the tears from her eyes with the hand that wasn't holding his, her chest heaving with great, hiccupping sobs.

"Stop crying," he grimaced, "and help me sit up."

She obeyed instantly, her arm sliding behind his back and lifting him upward with a strength he wouldn't have guessed she could possess; her crying became silent as she helped his muscles bring him upright. Her hand slid from his to arrange the pillows behind him, and he leaned back against them, cringing at the pain that traced delicate patterns across his neck, his ribs, his back. He turned to her as she slid back into her chair, letting him support himself. He was surprised he was strong enough to do so.

"How?" he demanded roughly. "Nagini's bite should have killed me in mere minutes, if not seconds. You didn't return for hours."

She stared at him with eyes full of fear. "I would have stayed," she said, her voice pleading, "but I knew—we had to make destroying Vol—the Dark Lord," she amended, clearly frightened by the look on his face, "our first priority. I cast a spell to slow the bleeding straight off…I knew it would only buy you a few hours, but the battle wouldn't go on much longer than that, I thought, we were so close…"

"The venom?" he questioned. "I'm certain the Dark Lord instructed Nagini to assure my death…"

She shook her head. "It took some intensive spells…but Harry was bitten by Nagini, too, at Christmas, and it was the same in theory, really, the venom wasn't the worst of the problems, the damned snake nearly ripped apart the structure of your throat, that was the difficult bit—"

"Why, then, Granger?" he interrupted her again. "Why return to save me, when I have committed so many heinous crimes that, the instant the war ended, the Order would only imprison me?"

"You can't really think that," she admonished. "The memories you gave Harry—"

"He is alive?" he interrupted, staring at her with a black gaze, and then he hissed furiously. "Don't tell me the brat shouted them to the world—"

"No!" she cried. "He—he barely shared them with us—there are bits I'm sure he's still keeping to himself—but he wanted you exonerated, he wanted you recognized, you were cleared the instant Vol—the Dark Lord—was destroyed—it was you, after all! You were helping us all this time, and we didn't even know it!"

"Exactly," he snapped, shifting a bit. "You _didn't _know. So why return, still thinking me guilty of the crimes I have committed?"

Her brown eyes didn't blink; he sensed her struggle to keep the tears from falling. "At the back of my mind, I always trusted you," she whispered. "You were horrid to Harry but—you always stood in the way when his life was threatened—I couldn't believe, even after Dumbledore, that you were really as horrible as you seemed—you had sacrificed so much for us, for this—"

"Foolish," he interrupted. "You had no proof."

Her eyebrows knitted. "Yes, I suppose," she murmured in assent, and stared down at her lap rather than at him.

After a moment of silence, he murmured, "So the Dark Lord is well and truly dead."

She nodded once, still not looking at him.

"I suppose I should thank you."

She shook her head, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. "Don't," she said. "I'm sure you don't want to. You planned to die, didn't you, when it was all over? You _wanted _to die. I would!" She let out a shrill laugh. "Your life hasn't been your own for over twenty years!"

Unbidden, his lip curled in a smirk. "Clever girl." A few of the tears escaped; they wound down her cheeks, leaving more paths, more glittering trails through the grime; for a moment, she looked rather confused. He had, after all, never complimented her before. "I must say," he growled, making to swing his legs out of the bed, "Potter would never have managed it without you."

She opened her mouth to speak, but it snapped shut again almost immediately. She looked unsteady, anxious, and swayed a bit where she sat.

Recognizing the symptoms, he asked sharply, "When did you last sleep?"

She checked the watch on her wrist and flinched. "It's been…four, five days? I've lost count. Before we broke into Gringotts. Before the battle. That was…the battle was three days ago."

He swore. "Foolish!" His voice rose with his next words. "Poppy!"

The woman scuttled from her office, which was just next to his bed; he had been concealed from sight from the rest of the ward by a long curtain. "Severus—" she began, in a choked voice.

"Not now," he barked. "Force Miss Granger to lie down, and give her something to restore her health and her magic. She has drained herself."

The girl was shaking her head, getting to her feet. "No, no, I'm fine. I'll just go have a nap in Gryffindor Tower. Maybe get Kreacher to bring me a sandwich—"

He knew she would faint, had resigned himself to the fact, and in a flash was upright; she fell bonelessly into his arms. He was not strong enough to do anything but keep her from falling to the floor, long enough for Poppy to rush forward and lift Granger onto the bed by magic. "You weren't watching her?" he growled, turning to the matron.

"She wouldn't let anyone else near," the woman said, frowning at the girl. "Potter and Weasley tried to get her to come away, to sleep, but she wouldn't have it—she's been working spells and brewing potions for three straight days and she nearly killed Weasley when he tried to physically drag her away…she's been out of her mind. But then, we all have."

For a moment, Severus Snape stared down into the worn face of Hermione Granger. "The stupid chit," he murmured. "She ought to have left me to die."

Without another word, he turned on his heel and moved off, slowly, down the ward, not responding when voices cried out to him, ignoring the words that were flung his way. If he was to be forced to live, he would have a bath in his own chambers before facing the rest of the Wizarding population.

Of course, they weren't his chambers anymore; he wasn't certain why he'd expected to find solace there, given that the gargoyle at the entrance was quite dismantled. As it was, when he brushed through the door to his own office, he found Minerva McGonagall poised at his desk, her head cradled in her hand, watching the door, as though she'd been waiting for him.

Before she could speak, he held up a hand. "You can make your atrocious apologies _later_," he snapped. "If I'm forced to smell of grime and my own blood any longer, I'll make certain Granger's misguided attentions were entirely in vain."

She gave one sharp nod and rose from his desk. As she passed him, her fingers touched his shoulder, the lightest brush, and she was gone, the door snapping quietly closed behind her.

His dark eyes turned immediately on the portrait just above the desk, the one of a beaming, silver-haired wizard. "Happy?" he ground out.

"My dear boy, you can't have honestly thought that I didn't want you to survive the war!" the likeness of Albus Dumbledore beamed, his blue eyes lit up with the twinkle that had danced there in life.

"Did you ever, once, in the many years I spent in sullen servitude to you, consider that _I_ didn't want to survive?" he snarled in return, and without pausing to hear the late headmaster's many complaints, he jerked open the door that led through to his rooms and let it slam behind him.

* * *

><p>Hermione came to with a few familiar faces hovering over her, anxiety outlined in each of them. The closest, red hair and freckles, breathed a distinct sigh of relief as she blinked in befuddlement and tried to sit up. He also leaned forward to help her do so, his arm sliding behind her back with welcome support. "How're you feeling?" Ron's low voice asked her, worry outlining every syllable of his tone.<p>

She put a hand to her head and drew a deep breath. "I've been better," she admitted. "I feel…weak." It wasn't in the physical sense, necessarily, though she did feel bone-weary on that account. It was more that some small thread of something was gone from within her, or had diminished to a point so small that she couldn't truly feel its existence.

"Your magic hasn't been fully restored yet," Harry told her, scooting a bit closer to her bed as well.

"What he means is, you might have stretched your limits a bit, love," Ron added, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. She managed to smile at him, momentarily happy at the new endearment, pleased by the embarrassed grin that he gave her back.

"But thanks," Harry said, reaching out to squeeze her hand.

She gave him a startled look. "For what?"

He snorted. "You think, after seeing all those memories, that I don't want to have a good long chat with Snape? I'm bloody glad he's still alive. We have a few things to talk about, don't you reckon?"

"Harry, I don't think he's necessarily going to _want _to—"

"Let him have his dreams," Ginny's quiet voice interrupted as she fell down into the seat on the other side of Hermione's bed. "He'll be disabused of the idea after Snape has thrown him bodily from his rooms a few more times."

Hermione's startled eyes snapped back to Harry's as Ron chuckled quietly. "Did he?" she asked, slightly amused.

"No," Harry grumped, shooting Ginny an annoyed look, which she returned with an innocent smile. "He just wouldn't let me in at all. Though, seeing as he's only been back among the living for about nine hours, I guess I wasn't entirely surprised. He isn't too chuffed about it."

"Of course he isn't," Hermione muttered, twisting her fingers in the bed sheets. "He _wanted _to die. I'm sure he's furious with me."

"Don't worry," Ron said bracingly, "it isn't as if you'll ever have to see him again—"

She raised her eyebrows. "I can't see how I'm going to manage that, seeing as he'll probably go back to being a professor."

"How does that have anything to do with it?"

"Oh, goodness, Ron, isn't it obvious?" Ginny interrupted, leaning forward with her elbows on the bed. "You didn't really think she wouldn't come back to sit her N.E.W.T.s?"

Ron stared blankly at his sister. "You've got to be kidding."

Ginny, however, merely turned to smile at Hermione. "It'll be grand. We'll get to be year-mates and everything."

"You'll forgive me if I don't join you in the endeavour," Harry broke in dryly. "Kingsley's already asked me to help out rebuilding the Ministry, and I don't think he'd be too chuffed if I refused just to redo my final year."

"But we've been asked along, too!" Ron said, his blue eyes turning on Hermione again. "We're bloody heroes of war, you know, they don't care about our grades anymore!"

Hermione shrugged. "I know that. I'd just like to sit my N.E.W.T.s. That's all. I'd already decided that, if I survived, I would go back for my seventh year."

Ron heaved a sigh. "I should've known."

At that moment, they were interrupted by a plaintive mew, and Hermione turned to see her beloved familiar bounding toward her across the ward. "Crookshanks!" she cried, and the cat leapt up onto the bed, purring, to greet her.

"Oh, right," Ron said, having leaned back a bit from the enthusiastic cat. "I'd forgotten. He wouldn't be left behind when we visited the Burrow today, practically scratched me to pieces before we realized he wanted to come along."

Hermione, beaming, gathered the cat up in her arms. He continued to purr. "Thanks," she told Ron. "I'm sorry about the scratches."

He shrugged. "Eh. It's alright. I suppose he just missed you."

The cat settled itself on her lap, tail twitching in a jaunty sort of way.

"Anyway," Harry broke in, as Hermione gazed adoringly at her cat, "we weren't supposed to keep you awake for too long. Madam Pomfrey reckons you need a few days of rest before you've got your strength back."

"A few more _days_?" she demanded shrilly. "I can't stay here for a few more _days_!"

Harry got to his feet, and reached down to squeeze her shoulder. "Relax," he told her. "You'll have all summer to find your parents. A few more days won't hurt. You need to recover."

She sighed and settled back against the pillows. "I suppose you're right."

"Of course he is. You can't go running after your parents without your magic!" Ginny leaned forward to hug her. "Maybe I'll come with you. Australia's lovely, I've heard, though I suppose they're in the dead of winter right now. Try to rest, Hermione."

Harry and Ginny left the hospital wing together, his arm sliding up to wrap around her shoulders. Hermione watched them go, smiling slightly at the sight, and then, somewhat nervously, her gaze returned to Ron. He got out of his seat and sat on the edge of her bed instead, closer to her, and she felt soothed by the proximity.

"I reckon right now isn't the best time to really talk," he said, in half of a mutter, his eyes focused on the point where his hand had intertwined with hers again. "You must be exhausted."

"I could do with the sleep," she admitted, as a yawn nearly overtook her. "Ron, I'm sorry I shouted, before—"

He squeezed her hand. "It's fine," he said. "I can't blame you. Our nerves were all a bit…shot…and you were just trying to stop one more needless death. Mind you, I'm not going to get chummy with the bloke, no matter what Harry does, but it's good for one less person to have died."

She squeezed his hand back. "I'm sorry about Fred, Ron," she whispered.

It seemed that he was unable to reply; he just drew her into his arms and, for a long moment, they held one another, as if she could share his grief in some minute way.

"I'll come with you to Australia, if you'll have me," his voice said, abruptly, hoarse in her ear. "It'd be a nice change of scenery from camping." She felt a slight shudder go through him, and she let out an unwilling giggle. "I know Ginny says she'll come, but she'll probably want to stay with Harry, and he's going to be stuck here, where they can get hold of him easily, for a bit."

"I'd really like you to come with me, Ron," she answered honestly.

He drew back from her a bit, his arms still looped around her waist, and grinned at her. She was happy that, despite the war, despite everything, a trace of boyishness still showed through Ron's smile. "Good," he said happily. "We'll get everything sorted when you've gotten some rest and be off as soon as you want."

She smiled at him. "Thanks, Ron."

He hesitated for a split second, and then added, softly, "And…" His fingertips lifting her chin, and he leaned in to kiss her gently. It was nothing like the fiery, enthusiastic kiss during the battle, but it was, nonetheless, filled with just as much caring. When he drew back, she felt short on breath, and realized that, as his fingertips were caressing her cheek, hers were touching his face in turn. "It wasn't just some spur-of-the-moment, we-might-be-about-to-die thing," he told her seriously. "I know I've been a prat and all, in the past, but…I love you, Hermione. And maybe it took a bloody war for me to realize it, but I know it now. So. If you'll have me."

Her eyes were filling with tears as she stared into his face. "Of course," she whispered. "Of course, Ron, of course. I love you, too. I think that's been rather obvious."

He grinned sheepishly. "It might have been. Once or twice."

It was with great contentment that she dozed off after Ron had left, and only for a moment did any thoughts of Severus Snape pervade her mind. She shook off the image of his broken body on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, however, and fell toward a dreamless sleep.


	2. Unwelcome Arrivals

TWO

_Unwelcome Arrivals_

Severus Snape was not about to give up his long walks around the grounds in the evening, even if Minerva did insist on his presence for the welcoming of their newest staff member. He could be a moment or two—an hour or two—late to the party, and no one would miss him; she knew that, surely. Oh, Slughorn might like a bit of chatter with him once in a while, but otherwise, the other professors left him well enough alone. He was not the same man he'd once been, and even the man he'd once been would not have enjoyed idle chatter. He was tired, and he liked his peace these days. It was a wonder Minerva even let him stay on, with his current attitude, but they had a sort of quiet understanding, after all.

He had to admit he felt a sort of grim curiosity about their newest addition. With Slughorn retired, they would require a Potions Master, and those typically weren't easy to come by. They needed training, they needed sufficient grades in their N.E.W.T.s, and hardly any student had managed higher than a pass while Severus himself had held the post. He suppressed a smirk. It wasn't his fault the dunderheads couldn't learn how to properly brew anything. Potions was a difficult subject at best, and a horridly tricky one at worst.

A rustle came from nearby; he glanced up to see the Whomping Willow, its branches activated in the twilight. His wand fell into his hand from his sleeve in an instant; squinting, he made out a small creature darting around the wildly swaying branches. Before long, it bounded just out of reach. The bundle of orange fur was vaguely familiar. Surely he'd seen that particular half-kneazle stalking around the castle? That had been years ago, though, he thought; he hadn't seen that particular ill-tempered cat in quite a long time. With a high-pitched mew, it made for him, still bounding as though springs were attached to its paws, and twined around his legs when it reached him, still plaintively whining for attention.

"Fuck," he muttered, leaning down to stroke the cat's head. It purred happily. He remembered the cat; it had spent long hours following him, presumably on Granger's orders, while she attended her belated seventh year at Hogwarts. He had even become a bit fond of it. It had spent a long nine months stalking him, after all; he'd gotten used to it. It was ill-tempered, but it was a comfortable animal, clearly intelligent. Its return couldn't mean anything good, however. Was the girl here for a visit? She was widely known to be friendly with Minerva, but it was odd timing. A few days before the start of term was hardly the time for visiting; they were all quite busy in the week leading up to the first of September.

Crookshanks butted against his hand, still mewing happily, and twined through his legs once more before bouncing a few steps ahead of him, toward the castle. The cat looked over its shoulder and mewed again, as though it expected him to follow.

He sighed heavily. He was already late for the blasted party. It wouldn't hurt to humour the beast.

"Alright," he growled aloud. "Lead the way."

Seeming to sense that he wasn't at all inclined to move quickly, the cat stalked forward at a pace more similar to his own, and he followed it back toward the castle, turning over the presence of the half-kneazle in his mind.

Hermione Granger was many things, but she was not stupid, as much as it pained him to admit it. Nor was she tactless; he couldn't see her imposing herself upon the staff when they were preparing for the start of term. Unfortunately, this left only one explanation for the reason her beast was here, bounding up the steps to the castle, and he didn't particularly like that explanation. He had no idea where she'd found the qualifications for the post, for one thing. As far as he knew, she had been tirelessly working for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement since she'd finally left Hogwarts. Devoting oneself to the Ministry of Magic rarely left spare time to become a Potions Mistress.

The cat returned to him as they stepped into the Entrance Hall; grudgingly, he allowed it to leap into his arms, where it settled happily, its squashed face turned to face the empty foyer, tail flicking lazily. "I suppose you thought I would remember the way from here?" he asked sardonically as he prowled forward.

No, this didn't bode well at all.

The cat let out another soft purr as they approached the staff room, the sounds of cheer already tumbling from around the cracked door. He shifted the cat enough in his arms to free one hand and pushed the door to the staff room open, his dark eyes sweeping its occupants. The cat unfurled and jumped lightly from his arms, winding its way through legs toward its mistress, who stood at the centre of the knot of people, speaking animatedly with Minerva.

"Crookshanks!" she said, in surprise, shifting her goblet to her left hand and gathering up the beast with her right. "Have you lost interest in the mice already?" Her golden-brown eyes lifted, in interest, to glance toward the door, and immediately snagged on the thin, dark man standing just inside.

"I believe," he said, his voice darkly sardonic, "that your familiar was _fetching _me."

A smile twitched up the corner of her mouth as Filius and Pomona both laughed. "I'm sorry," she apologized. "He seems to have taken a liking to you. You ought to be honoured. He's not on friendly terms with just anyone, you know."

He didn't answer her, merely took up a goblet of nettle wine and raised it to his lips, remaining a few paces back from the rest of the small group. Most of them moved away, chattering amongst themselves. Hagrid was deep in his tankard of mulled mead and swayed a bit as Granger patted him on the arm.

"Perhaps you ought to sit down, Hagrid," she suggested lightly, nudging him with an elbow to the thigh, which was about as high as she could reach on the half-giant.

Sobering slightly, he grunted, "I reckon yer righ', 'Ermione," and shuffled off to a particularly large chair near the fire, which he collapsed into heavily.

This left the Minerva, Granger, and Severus grouped near the table where the refreshments were stationed, and the Headmistress took this moment to point out to Severus the disturbing fact that he had already deduced for himself.

"Severus, Hermione is our new Potions Mistress," Minerva said crisply, offering her one-time student a plate of canapés as she spoke. Granger, her hands full of her cat and wine, declined. Crookshanks's yellow eyes were fixed on Severus, who looked back just as unblinkingly.

"So it would seem." He sipped his wine. The soft chatter of the other professors filled the otherwise pregnant pause. "Tell me, Miss Granger, when does one find the time to complete the appropriate Potions apprenticeship while working for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement?"

She smiled thinly. "During every holiday and hour off, Professor."

He raised an eyebrow, but didn't question her further. Minerva appeared quite irked at his silence.

"She was the last student—one of the only students in recent memory—to achieve an 'Outstanding' in her Potions N.E.W.T. Surely you don't disapprove, Severus?"

"You're asking a rather loaded question, Minerva," the younger woman joked, her eyes filling with momentary mirth. "He has plenty of reasons to disapprove of my being anywhere near the castle."

Golden-brown eyes rested momentarily on his, dancing with light and warmth, but he wasn't caught off guard. "If you've had your fill of my company," he said, no inflection to his deep tone, "I'll retire for the night, Headmistress." He nodded once at the older witch, and then turned to leave.

"Severus—"

"Oh, let him go," Granger's voice murmured as he swept toward the door. "We needn't torture him on my account…Crookshanks!"

But the cat had already bounded out of her arms and followed Severus out the door, tailing him at a distance all the way to his rooms on the first floor. Before the beast had a chance to slip past him, however, he shut the door, keeping the beast at bay.

With unnecessary force, he slammed his goblet of wine on his desk—it was already half-empty, but the contents still sloshed from the glass—and left it there. Another few steps put him at the bookcase which led through to his sitting room. He stepped through the concealed door, and heard a few books clatter to the floor as the passage slammed shut behind him. No matter; none of them were valuable. A further few paces put him at the cabinet where he put the hard liquor for occasions such as these, and he yanked open the doors with barely subdued rage, rifling around within for the half-drained bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhisky he hadn't touched in some time. Settling himself into the armchair before the fire, he lifted a glass of the amber liquid to his lips and drank, letting the alcohol burn down his throat.

He was over-reacting, he reasoned with himself, as he waited for the alcohol to take effect. There would be no reason to interact extensively with the brat, no reason at all. Mealtimes and staff meetings, at the most, and he always didtry to seat himself at the end of the table in those instances, where only one person would be forced to take the seat beside him. Thus far, it appeared that she had no intentions of foisting her unwelcome company upon him; she had convinced Minerva to let him leave the party, after all.

She didn't look at all as he remembered her, but perhaps that was because he best remembered her as she was when she woke him to face his second life. Grievously thin, clearly malnourished, bearing the scars, grime, and blood of battle, her hair a tangled mess, her eyes dark with hopelessness; he had been unable to erase the image she had presented to him, one that was more reminiscent of death than of some angelic saviour. Gone was his vision of her as the Muggle-born brat, a know-it-all first year, a Gryffindor. Instead he saw the shadows under her eyes, the age on the face of an eighteen-year-old who bore her weight as though she'd lived ten, twenty years longer.

He downed the rest of the glass with one gulp, and set the decanter back on the small table beside his armchair. The relief in her dark eyes was still vivid in his memory. The relief that he, of all people, was alive. Relief wasn't the appropriate emotion for her to have felt; more fitting would have been dread, regret, anxiety.

He had attended the ceremonies he'd been expected to; he'd accepted his Order of Merlin, First Class with good grace; he'd gone to the first Victory Day celebration, a year after the day he should have died, and only endured it by lurking in a corner where no one could accost him for most of the evening. The excitement had died down after that. People had assumed that just because Severus Snape had been fighting for the good and light all along, he would suddenly become the good man they all thought he was hiding, deep down. _People _were sorely disappointed by the truth of the matter; ex-spies did not make good heroes.

As if any of them could ever understand, he sneered to himself, fighting the temptation to pour another glass of Firewhisky. As if any of them could comprehend the simplicity of loyalty to a _person_, and not to a _cause_, and that neither required a change to his demeanour in the slightest.

He leaned back in his armchair and lifting his wand. "_Expecto patronum_," he intoned, his voice harsh, focusing with all his strength on the memory of a day—a girl—his best friend—

The doe emerged and picked her way quietly toward him to lay her head on the armrest of his chair, and he looked his fill, the old ache so familiar that it brought forth no new emotions, only old regrets.

And then, interrupting his reverie, a soft knock sounded on the door beyond his sitting room, the one which led to his office.

Silently cursing every Gryffindor he'd ever come into contact with, he got to his feet, turning his eyes away as the doe dissolved into thin air. He passed through his office, clearing up the mess of nettle wine with a wave of his wand, and sharply yanked open the door leading to the corridor just as another soft knock was made.

He had been expecting the Headmistress and a full reprimand for leaving the party early. Unfortunately, however, it appeared that he had underestimated Granger's desire to impose her company upon him. She stood in the doorway, her cat in her arms, a look of relative calm on her features as she faced him, and asked if she might be allowed in for a moment.

* * *

><p>She could smell the faint hint of Firewhisky about Severus Snape, but it had not affected his countenance; his eyes were as dark, and as brooding, as ever, his posture just as stiff and unyielding. He looked equally as unhappy to see her as if he hadn't been drinking, which she supposed she ought to be grateful for. At least he didn't fly into a rage at the mere sight of her.<p>

"Might I come in for a moment?" she asked, politely enough, adjusting Crookshanks in her arms.

He looked on the brink of refusing her entry, but then, with merely a muted glare at her, he stepped aside to allow her to enter.

"Thank you," she said graciously, crossing the threshold and making a beeline for the spindly wooden chair seated just in front of the grand desk. The door snapped closed, and his nearly silent footsteps followed her. Keeping a firm hold on Crookshanks, who made every movement as a bid for freedom to explore, she settled in, as much as one could make oneself comfortable in such a chair. The walls were lined with bookshelves; she noticed that a few books, from a shelf just behind his desk, were scattered on the floor, but the instant she spotted this, she looked away.

He seated himself behind the desk, and surveyed her with a black stare that brooked no room for any pleasantries. It didn't escape her notice that he hadn't yet uttered a single word.

"Well, I suppose you aren't cheery enough to offer me anything stronger than the wine Minerva was serving," Hermione sighed, finally releasing her hold on a squirming Crookshanks, who leapt to the floor and began to prowl the edges of the desk in interest.

He raised a single eyebrow. "I was not under the impression that this would be a lengthy visit," he said without heat.

The mere sound of his voice nearly succeeded in raising goose bumps on her arms; it was silly, really, that after surviving a war and saving his life, she could still fear this man.

"I suppose it won't be, then," she said lightly, and allowed the room to fall into silence once more, merely looking at him, unsure of how to proceed.

He appeared unchanged, if, perhaps, healthier than she'd seen him last—healthier, perhaps, than she'd seen him in all her years at Hogwarts. The permanent shadows under his eyes were lighter, his hair less greasy; she could see that he was no longer so terribly rail-thin, though still quite reedy; just above the collar of his many layers of black wool, she could see the edge of a scar. None of this made any difference. Snape still commanded the air around him with foreboding; despite the minor indications that he was profiting from more sleep and less stress, he still looked the part of the Slytherin bully.

"I know you don't like me," she began, and the only reaction he gave was a twitch at the corner of his mouth which might have been the beginning of a sneer. "I know you dislike me _especially _because I deigned to keep you alive, when you would rather have found your peace in the silence of the grave." She paused, her eyes searching his black ones. They really were quite dark; deep, like bottomless wells, swimming with the emptiness of an ex-spy, still so engrained with the habits that had kept him alive that they hadn't left him, even after both his masters had been dead for nearly a decade. "I would just appreciate it if you kept the animosity at a dull roar," she continued, hoping to startle some mirth out of him. "I don't mind a bit of animosity. Just not enough to send me into hysterics."

His eyes glittered dangerously. "I have no intention of showing _any _animosity, Miss Granger. I have every intention of ignoring you, like the rest of the staff, as much as the minimal level of decency allows."

She repressed the desire to correct him with an "It's _Professor _Granger," and got to her feet. "Right, then. Good to have that sorted out. I also come bearing a message."

His other eyebrow joined the first.

"It's from Harry," she began apologetically.

To her surprise, he made a soft noise of annoyance in his throat. "After eight years of shouting and ignoring the oblivion out of the Boy Wonder, he still hasn't got it through his thick head that I want nothing to do with him," he muttered with a faint note of weariness in his deep baritone.

"Yes," she said with a shrug. "Can you blame him? Don't answer that," she said sharply, as he made every indication of answering in the affirmative. "He'd merely like it if you stopped sending his Christmas presents back. And answered a letter or two once in a while—answer a few of his questions now and again. And about the presents, he says you can chuck them in the fire if you want, he just wants you to get _some _use out of them."

The glare he aimed at her was filled with distaste. She made for the door, deciding that that look was answer enough, and that she was just going to have to write to Harry and tell him to give up on his determination to wheedle Snape into any sort of camaraderie.

"Oh," she added, turning on her heel just as her hand touched the doorknob. "I'd forgotten. I've also been made Head of Gryffindor. Professor Sinistra resigned; she claims that the lot of them are simply too much to handle." She felt a small smile turn her lips for a moment, in spite of the deeper annoyance that was filling his features. "I _will _try to stay out of your way as much as you'd like, but I can't say the same for my House."

With that, she called to Crookshanks, who reluctantly followed her from the room, leaving a silently seething Severus behind them.


	3. Dunderheads and Kneazles

THREE

_Dunderheads and Kneazles_

"Hard day, Neville?"

Neville Longbottom, newly apprenticed to Pomona Sprout, did indeed look worse for the wear as he slid into the seat beside Hermione at the staff table. His hands and face were clean, but there was the distinct scent about his person of sweat and the greenhouses; his light brown hair was ruffled, his jade-green eyes harried. "I've had better," he admitted, reaching for a large dish of mashed potatoes and heaping a generous portion onto his plate. "One of the second-years didn't fasten her earmuffs properly and got an earful of Mandrake. It wasn't pleasant. And nearly half of the fifth years took some bad bites off of a Fanged Geranium. It's in a horrid mood this season." He pulled a platter of steak toward him and added a thick slab to his plate.

"Horrid," Pomona agreed, taking her seat on the other side of Neville. "He's quite right. It's the humidity; they like the drier years best."

It was, Hermione agreed, too humid for _her_ liking. The sheer number of bodies packed into the Great Hall drove up the temperatures, despite the many cooling charms cast over the place. For September, it was unreasonably hot.

"How was your first day, Hermione?" Neville questioned, now digging into his food with ferocity reminiscent of Ron. This was an uncomfortable thought, however, so she pushed it away, and glanced out over the students instead.

"It could have been worse," she murmured, helping herself to green beans. "My first years were a bit afraid of me at first; I think they've all been brought up to fear the Potions lab. Some of them even thought I might be Professor Snape. Clearly, they've got a bit of History to learn." She rolled her eyes as Neville chuckled. "No explosions, though, and I suppose I ought to count myself lucky. As I recall, in my first Potions lesson, _someone _melted straight through their cauldron." She shot a sly grin at Neville, who turned a bit red and busied himself with his steak.

Minerva arrived then; she seated herself on Hermione's other side, at the centre chair of the staff table. "Indeed," she said dryly. "I'm sure Severus would be glad to reminisce at length about the many dunderheads who frequented his Potions classes."

Hermione stole a glance past Minerva, down the long high table to the very end, where the brooding Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor sat, loading his plate with food. "I'm sure Severus would be glad to do nothing of the sort," Hermione corrected in an undertone, watching as her cat, per his habit over the last week, seated himself just beneath Severus's legs. The man appeared not to notice, ignoring the cat with a focus that impressed her. "Not to me, anyway."

Neville looked up from his food, now that memories of his past Potions lessons had been safely stowed away. "Don't know why he's so fussed," he muttered darkly, eyeing the one-time Potions Master. "You'd think he'd be a bit grateful to you, you know. Not _very _grateful, but a bit."

Hermione poured gravy over her potatoes. "In his opinion, I just prolonged his miserable and unhappy existence in this world. I wouldn't be too chuffed with me, either." She gathered up her long hair, heavy with curls, in the elastic kept on her wrist, and leaned forward to start eating.

"Your cat seems to have taken a liking to him," Minerva commented, raising her eyebrows in interest.

"It was like that during seventh year, too. It's odd, isn't it? I'm sure he thinks I'd just put Crookshanks up to it, to keep an eye on his health, but Crookshanks just seems to _like _him. I think Severus must be seeing more of my cat than I am these days." Hermione frowned at this while Minerva and Neville both watched Crookshanks, curled up like a loyal pet, now wrapped around one of Severus's ankles. Still, he didn't notice—or appeared not to. "He's never taken to _anyone _like this before. I mean, goodness, he still has a thing against Ron."

"I reckon all of us have a bit of a thing against Ron once in a while," Neville said darkly. "He can be a bit of a prat."

Hermione rolled her eyes, and stuffed down the momentary pang in her heart before it could rise out of control. "Yes, I suppose you're right." She pushed aside her plate of green beans—hot food just seemed too much at the moment, with the sweltering humidity bearing down on them—and ladled berry soup into her bowl, adding a well-crusted sourdough bread to her plate. Neville, perceptive enough to sense that she didn't wish to pursue the subject at all, merely smiled at her and went back to his food. Hermione, on her part, lifted a spoonful of berry soup to her mouth, going back to her covert observations of Severus Snape. He had given in to the attentions of her cat, and was now slipping bits of food under the table for Crookshanks to sample, maintaining a stony expression all the while. She hid her grin in her goblet.

She trusted her cat; she had from the first day she'd met him. He'd been her faithful companion over the years, the loyal pet who offered her comfort when she suffered at the hands of stupid boys or cruel remarks. He was getting on in years, she thought—he hadn't been young when she'd bought him—but the half-kneazle part of him seemed to keep him vivacious. His judgment had always been sound. Scabbers, Ron, Sirius, and now Severus. Clearly, there was something about him that the cat liked.

_Well, what isn't to like? _she thought absentmindedly, taking another spoonful of her soup. _He's a bit snide still, of course, but he saved all our necks. He can get away with being cruel once in a while._

As Severus went back to his food, Crookshanks stalked down the table to Hermione, leaping up into her lap with a happy purr. To her surprise, there was a slip of parchment tucked under the thin leather collar around his neck. Slipping it out, she unfolded the small note. She would recognize the spiky handwriting anywhere; it was familiar enough from the seven years in which Professor Snape had graded her papers.

_Call off the cat. I can assure you, my health is fine, and he gets a bit tiresome._

Hermione stifled a giggle. Neville looked at her questioningly. She merely shook her head, and turned the parchment over, pulling a quill out of her bag to write a reply.

_Sorry, Professor. Crooks just likes you. I miss my familiar, but I can't deny him his whims._

As soon as she'd tucked the note back under his collar, Crookshanks leapt down from her lap and followed Severus out of the Great Hall, bottlebrush tail held high.

"You're quite right about him, Hermione," Minerva said, watching the cat and the man go.

"What about him?" Hermione asked, going back to her soup.

"He doesn't seem inclined to speak to any of us anymore." She exchanged a glance with Pomona, who nodded in agreement. "Mind, he's polite enough. But some wounds…well, I suppose we will never be bosom friends, after what transpired while he was Headmaster."

"You didn't know, Minerva," Pomona interrupted promptly. "None of us did."

"It's unfair," Hermione muttered, suffering a pang of annoyance as she looked into her soup bowl, frowning. "He's done so much, and received nothing."

"He received an Order of Merlin, First Class, that's something," Neville pointed out.

"Medals are not typically sufficient to relieve loneliness," Minerva said delicately. Neville tried to cover his bemused look.

"Haven't you tried talking with him?" Hermione asked the Headmistress.

"Often," she replied. "He's carefully guarded himself. It's difficult to have a conversation with someone who imitates stone. I can't blame him," she added, seeing Hermione on the verge of interrupting. "We had so little faith in him. A man who has been given no trust will often not trust in return."

There was a moment of subdued silence, and then Neville spoke up. "This is too heavy for me. How's Harry, Hermione? I haven't heard from him recently…"

"Oh, he's pleased," Hermione answered, her thoughts leaving the subject of Snape with reluctance. "Haven't you heard? Ginny's expecting again."

Neville's jaw dropped. "You're kidding!"

She shook her head. "Another boy. Ginny wanted a girl, but she figures they can always try again, now that she's done with the Quidditch circuit for good."

"Wow," Neville mused, poking at his potatoes. "Good for them."

"How's Luna?" Hermione asked. "Still travelling?"

"Yeah," Neville replied, smiling ruefully. "I get a letter every week about another clue to the whereabouts of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. She reckons she's getting close, now."

Hermione stifled her laughter. "Oh, Luna," she murmured.

* * *

><p>The bloody cat wouldn't leave Severus alone.<p>

It had been a week, and it was still following him around as though he was its master, and the girl was a long-forgotten parcel of cat-nip. Despite his many attempts to keep it out, it had followed him all the way through to his sitting room this time, and was curled up before the flameless hearth, watching him with yellow-brown eyes that reminded him vaguely of the thing's mistress.

A pleasant idea occurred to him, one that would rid him of the beast at least for the night. He got to his feet, and it immediately followed, stretching languidly, its eyes on him. Purposefully, he strode out of his sitting room, and it bounded after him, carefully to his side and half a pace behind to keep up with him. It purred as he set the wards back in place around his office once they were out, and then kept close to him as he made his way to the dungeons and the quarters he'd once inhabited.

It seemed eager enough to follow him; he would see if it could be persuaded to stay in her rooms, with its mistress, once he arrived there.

Once Minerva had given him back the Defence Against the Dark Arts position, he'd taken up residence in the first-floor rooms adjacent to his classroom. He believed in the power of association, and the rooms there were harmless; there were rough memories in the very floorboards of his dungeon rooms, and Minerva had politely satisfied his request to move. Though, he supposed, there was nothing she wouldn't do for him at this point. The guilt on her was tangible; he could smell it. She would never understand that it had been essential for her to lose all faith in him that year, to withdraw all trust. That the Dark Lord would have believed nothing less, and that Severus would have been in greater danger had she kept her confidences with him.

He wouldn't have survived, but then, he wondered more with each passing day what _survival _really mattered, when there was nothing relatively pleasant about his continued existence.

His feet found their way without thinking. The air down here was colder; the cat let out an unhappy little noise from its throat, as though it wasn't fond of the chill. He resisted the urge to berate it aloud, to talk to it at all. It had been that action, he was sure, which had endeared the cat to him, and he wouldn't have it getting more ideas. Reaching the door to what had once been his old office, he knocked sharply. Hermione's tired voice called for him to enter.

He stole a glance at his watch as he felt her wards drop. It was barely ten o'clock, but she sounded bone-weary, and it was only the first day of classes—surely it hadn't been _that _tiresome? He turned the doorknob and stepped inside, the cat close at his heels.

She glanced up, and he noticed the twitch of surprise in her features as she greeted him. "Good evening, Professor," she managed, in what was a hearty attempt at her usual cheery tone. "And Crookshanks. Nice of you to visit, you bloody git." The cat pranced to her and jumped into her lap. She let out a quiet laugh, stroking the furry head of her beast as he purred, while Severus watched, feeling every inch an intruder on a very old relationship.

There was something strange on her skin, however, and he made to move closer on the pretence of dropping into the chair in front of her desk in order to get a closer look at it. The sleeves of her starched white, button-up shirt were rolled up to the elbows, and there, just barely visible, on the underside of her forearm, was a series of oddly-shaped scars—of what?

As he finally sat, however, she began rolling down her sleeves, starting with the arm under scrutiny. "What brings you here, Professor?" she asked, fastening the buttons back at her wrists; she glanced at the clock, noting the time with something like distaste.

"Returning your errant familiar. What else?" He gave her a black look, and the cat an equally unhappy gaze.

She didn't remain cheerful; she returned his look with a disgruntled one of her own. "I know you don't believe me," she told him earnestly, with a bit of annoyance in her tone, "but I honestly didn't put him up to it, seventh year. I wouldn't have dared. I may have saved your life, but you still commanded my respect, and I wouldn't have flouted it so by sending my damned cat after you just to check up on your health."

She leaned back, letting Crookshanks leap down and go to a bowl of food in the corner, her gaze still locked on his. He regarded her in interest, the unhappiness that was downright spilling out of her, now, the desperation with which she tried to convince him; there was something different about her, still, perhaps the defined nature of her facial features, the high cheekbones, the thin-but-not-skeletal appearance, the barely-tamed hair. And the circles under her eyes that were lightly purple, as though she was still losing sleep, despite the war being long dead and the Dark Lord cold in his grave—those shadows were nearly as deep as they'd been when he'd woken to her, but covered, a little frivolously, he thought, with concealer of some kind.

She'd grown up, but he wouldn't let his thoughts stray too far down that path. With the usual banishment he gave to such thoughts, he disregarded the womanly aura that clung to her, and returned to the problem at hand. He raised a single eyebrow in response to her outburst, and she coloured up almost immediately, but in a way that he could tell made her quite angry.

"Are you quite finished, Miss Granger?" he asked darkly.

She sighed, and the animosity seemed to flood out of her. "I'm sorry," she murmured, glancing down at her desk in clear embarrassment. He followed her gaze, and spotted the long bit of parchment she was looking at, which looked as though it might have been abused at her hands. "He just likes you. I've no idea how to get him to stop."

The silence ticked by for a moment, a moment in which she didn't look up at him, merely continued to stare at the parchment, a small frown on her lips. Crookshanks returned to the pair of them, this time opting to leap into Severus's lap, and he accepted the cat grudgingly, letting it curl up there.

With an effort, he forced himself not to tell Hermione to lock the beast in its cage. "I suppose there's nothing you can do about it," he acknowledged, nodding slightly to her. "I shall have to learn to live with the beast."

A brief smile flitted across her lips. "He has a name, you know."

This, he ignored. "Has he shown such dispositions in the past?"

She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, pulling her hair forward over one shoulder. Her sleeve rode up, just above the wrist; he caught a brief glimpse of those peculiar scars yet again before they were hidden. "He—well, he bloody hated Scabbers. Ron's rat," she added, when Severus raised an eyebrow. "My third year. It was just when I'd bought Crookshanks, and he took an _immediate _dislike to the thing." She smiled thinly. "Of course, we knew why later," she added quietly. "It was Peter Pettigrew all along, after all."

He nodded curtly. "Kneazles can sense deceit almost always, and by the look of him, he's at least half." He paused for a moment, allowing the cat a few strokes to the head; if he was going to have to live with it, he might as well live with it. "Has he ever taken a liking to anyone?"

"He got on well enough with Harry—never did recover from his animosity with Ron—and blatantly defended Sirius Black, when Harry pointed his wand at him—but, no. Other than me, I suppose. He's never really…you know, _stalked _anyone before. It's terribly bad manners. I suppose he's trying to make a point, but I've no idea what he's got in mind." She watched her cat thoughtfully, leaning forward at her desk as she did so.

They sat in quiet for a moment, both pairs of eyes on the cat, before she broke the silence. "How are the dunderheads this year?"

He glanced up to see a slight twinkle in her golden-brown eyes, despite the distinctly careworn expression her features clung to. "You would be a better judge than I," he pointed out dryly. "Ineptness shows itself more readily around cauldrons than wands."

She sighed and, with a nod of agreement, swept her arm out toward the racks of crystal phials on a side table, along with a sheaf of parchment that undoubtedly held the grades. He spotted one right off that could have been the work of a Longbottom imitator. "It wasn't terrific, but it wasn't fantastic, either. I don't see any rising stars, but the form has more students."

"Yes," he replied. "You find fewer of great promise, in generations where there is little threat, and this lot have grown up in near peace—they can scarcely remember what life may have entailed at the age of three, when the Dark Lord was at the height of his powers once more. They were born just before he rose to power again; times were prosperous, for the most part, thus the abundance—at the price of less talent, it would seem."

"Intriguing," she murmured. "My form was so small—"

"At the height of his first rise to power, not many had family planning on their minds," he interrupted.

"Indeed." A scowl rose to her features once more, and she glanced down at the parchment with an air of distaste.

He would have voiced his concerns for her, had he been a more social, more caring man; he could have gotten away with asking if she felt quite all right, because she did, after all, seem unreasonably tired, and more than a little on edge. As it were, he could hardly break with the persona he'd cultivated for thirty years or more, and so merely moved Crookshanks, as gently as he could, from his lap, the better to stand. She didn't follow suit.

"As enlightening as this has been, I have my own trials to endure in the form of marking tonight," he said flatly. "So if you'll excuse me, I'll bid you good night, Miss Granger."

To his relief, the cat seemed willing to stay put; he'd returned to his mistress, leapt onto her lap, and claimed her attention, as though sensing all was not well. Severus was at the door when her quiet voice halted his footsteps.

"It's Hermione." He turned to see her brush the hair off her forehead, and give him a quizzical, weary look. "I'm not twelve anymore, Professor."

His eyebrow lifted of its own accord. "Indeed." She held his gaze fast this time, no blush climbing her cheeks, no weakness in her posture. "Good night, Hermione."

He swept from the room, leaving thoughts of the peculiar scars on her arm and the wearied look on her face behind him with her damned cat.


	4. The Insufferable Nature of a Gryffindor

FOUR

_The Insufferable Nature of a Gryffindor_

She didn't bother him.

In fact, Severus was faintly shocked by her abilities in stealth. He'd spotted her only at mealtimes during the first week of term, and then only briefly. She kept mostly silent during the weekly staff meeting, and returned to her rooms soon after. Most damnable was his curiosity about the whole thing. He remembered a rather energetic girl, and the quiet wraith who had replaced her was unnerving. Her hand had always been waving in the air, hadn't it? She'd been so determined to speak out of turn, hadn't she?

She was quiet now. He had to strain to pick out her conversation with Minerva or Longbottom while at meals. Whenever he glimpsed her face, the shadows beneath her brown eyes were dark. She gave the appearance of having taken great care of herself—her hair well-tamed, her clothes clean and pressed if not always quite new—but it seemed as if she wasn't. And she was thin. Unusually thin, it seemed to him. Her clothes were a little loose, as though she'd lost some weight since she'd bought them.

As soon as he realized his thoughts had strayed in her direction again, he worked to stifle them. It wouldn't do. She was a curiosity, that was all—something new in the world that had been so incredibly simple for him over the past few years.

He was bored, he convinced himself. That was what made her so interesting.

As his fourth-year Defence students left the classroom, some still displaying the after-effects of a poorly-fought Imperius curse, Minerva entered. He was pleased, as always, that the students gave her just as wide a berth as they gave him. Even his Slytherins didn't dare come within striking distance anymore; they were uncertain of him, of themselves, of their place in their world, since the Dark Lord had fallen and the old truths of Slytherin House dissolved.

"Haven't found any future Aurors, I presume?" Minerva questioned, interrupting his thoughts.

A light sneer curled his lip. "None of them have the talent," he said dismissively. "Nor the raw power." He turned toward his desk, not wishing to invite her confidences, if she was here to discuss something important with him.

"Severus."

Her quiet voice brooked no argument. He turned to face her again, and saw that the look on her face, usually as unreadable as his, was perfectly clear. Anxiety and guilt, guilt and anxiety, the only things she appeared to feel in his presence any longer—but before he could stop her from launching into her customary attempts at reconciliation, she had spoken again.

"How long are we going to continue to ignore one another?" she questioned, her features speculative and melancholy now.

"I apologize if you were under the impression that I have been ignoring you, Headmistress," he said stiffly. His deep baritone sounded mechanic, even to him. "I assure you it was not my intent. Is there something you wish to discuss?"

She shook her head impatiently. "Please, spare me the charade."

His eyes narrowed; his voice lowered. "This is not a charade."

"This is all that's left, then?" she demanded. "Are you truly so empty?"

He raised a single eyebrow. "You are being dramatic," he said coolly, turning to sweep stacks of papers into his desk.

"Hardly," she returned, her voice taking on a hint of anger now. "You don't speak unless spoken to, you spend all the time you can hiding in your quarters, you don't socialize with the rest of the staff—perhaps it's not so different from how you were, but it is…disconcerting." The volume of her voice fell. "We are not at war anymore, Severus."

"Blessed as I am by superior intellect, I am aware of that, Minerva," he returned icily.

"Then why do you insist on continuing to behave like a spy?"

"Do you remember anything different?" he snarled, his back still to her. "When I was a boy, a teenager? I am not meant to be a social creature. Interaction is meaningless to me."

Her hand reached out to touch his shoulder; he felt it there, the lightest of brushes, so similar to how she'd passed her reassurance the first day of his second life that he nearly flinched. "For years, you tolerated us," she said quietly. "For years, you were an addition to this staff. Scarred, secretive, impatient, perhaps, but a man we could all rely on. I had hoped you would recover that, with time." She paused. "I would apologize, again, for having so little faith in you if I thought it would help. We know that it was necessary, but…I fear the damage is beyond repair."

"This is the only Severus Snape there is," he said; he had to fight for control of his voice, fight for it to come out smoothly, and not jagged with rage.

Her hand squeezed his shoulder lightly, and then released him. "You are the man who won us the war," she murmured. "The hero, as it were."

A smile, or rather, a grimace, twisted his lips. "I would have seemed more heroic to all involved had I been allowed to die."

"You're still a young man, Severus. You have the right to a full life…a happy one…now that your strings have been cut."

He turned slowly to look at her.

She shook her head. "I idolized Albus," she whispered, "and his actions…his manipulations…may have won us the war. But at what price, for you?"

"He did not intend for me to survive," he replied flatly. "He wished it, perhaps, but never did he believe that I would come out of the conflict unscathed."

"You sacrificed everything for our cause. And received no compensation."

"It was atonement," he said, his voice harsh now.

"Your suffering was undeserved," she said quietly.

He didn't respond. There was no point in rehashing, again, how very acutely he'd longed for that death—the blessed end to the tortured life he'd led since the day at the lakeside, the life without his best and only friend. How furious he'd been upon discovering that it had been snatched from him. How very much he resented Hermione Granger for taking his fate out of his hands.

Minerva, with one last look at his face—her eyes filled with regret—turned to go.

The instant she was out the door, he picked up the nearest object his shaking hands could find and hurled it at the wall.

* * *

><p>"I'll catch you up, Neville," Hermione said abruptly, stopping to listen at the door of Snape's classroom. She recognized that buzzing sound, and her curiosity was insatiable. There was no good reason she could think of for the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor to be using <em>Muffliato<em>.

"You can't honestly want to talk to that horror." He grimaced, but kept walking.

"I need a word with him about some points he docked yesterday." She put on the appropriate scowl, and he nodded and waved as he traipsed out of sight.

She held her breath, got her wand at the ready, and ducked as she slipped into the room. It was a good thing, too, because a glass jar narrowly missed her and exploded all over the door; her silent stasis charm just barely saved her from being covered in ink. She shielded herself, too, in time to miss the next flying object. The room was already a mess of broken things.

There was a roar of outrage, and her head snapped up to finally see him, wand lifted straight at her.

His curse shattered her shield, but she was ready; dodging it neatly, she fired back one of her own without a second thought. She didn't have time to think before another curse was being rebounded to her, and she didn't bother to shield. She dodged again. If there was one good thing she'd learned in that war, it was that dodging saves time and shields waste energy. As she jerked to the side, she let loose another jet of light, hoping to simply freeze him.

He was ferocious in battle, and for a moment, that was what this was: a battle, the classroom a war zone, the enemies they two. He had a disturbing sort of grace; he whirled away from her spells, as insubstantial as air, eyes black and unfathomable in their depths. She felt a sickening thrill as she danced to the side, throwing another curse in tandem with her movement.

It had been a long time since she'd felt so very alive.

Her heartbeat pounded, her blood sang in her ears, and every little bit of her revolved around the heat of the battle, giving her an effortless grace, a disturbing sense of oneness with herself. Hadn't it been that way, always, her own mortality more alive for her when she faced the loss of it? She certainly couldn't hope to win this particular fight, but it was satisfying, even with that knowledge. She'd never faced a wizard as competent as Severus Snape.

His next curse felled her, and her vision went black before she hit the floor.

* * *

><p>She was still breathing a bit hard when she came to, commanded by the deep voice that murmured "<em>Ennervate<em>" over her still form. Her eyes opened, and she stared into an angry black gaze. He was certainly no longer enraged, though, and that had to count for something.

"We should do that more often," she muttered with a sigh, pulling herself upright with the aid of an overturned desk. His hand hovered, inches from her, to catch her if she staggered, but she got to her feet well enough, wobbling only momentarily as the blood rushed to her head. "I'm out of practice."

This was clearly not the response he was expecting, or even hoping for; she thought she might have seen his lips tighten over a startled laugh. That would be something, she mused. Snape _laughing_.

"Is there any particular reason you chose to enter my classroom uninvited?" he demanded, now putting a few feet of space between them.

She considered lying, but knew that it was useless. "Just wondered why you were employing _Muffliato_," she said casually. "I thought perhaps you were torturing a first-year."

He cursed under his breath and turned from her to stride back to the front of the room.

"Would you like help cleaning up?" she asked politely, eyeing the considerable damage. Ink splattered everywhere, desks on their sides, glass broken apart on the floor; they had given no regard to the more fragile objects in the room.

He held up a hand, and she only then noticed he was bleeding. "No. Kindly remove yourself to the Great Hall. I've had enough of meddling Gryffindors today." He examined his own flesh; she thought the tightening around his eyes might be pain, but it was a small thing.

"Let me at least heal you," she said quietly, approaching him. "You know it's a drain on your health when you do it yourself."

He opened his mouth to snarl a response at her, but before he could say anything, she had taken his hand and pulled it gently toward her, moving aside the torn fabric that covered his left forearm. "Goodness," she murmured. "I'm sorry if I was the cause of that." There was glass in the long cut; it was shallow, but bleeding profusely, up the inside of his forearm.

She heard his mouth snap shut as she lifted her wand; head jerked upward, indicating the chandelier above them. It was missing a considerable amount of glass and crystal. "One of mine," he said, his voice stiff with what she suspected was repressed annoyance; at her or at himself, she couldn't be sure. "You dodged, it rebounded, and my reflexes are hardly what they were."

If his reflexes were hardly what they were, she would have been terrified to see him in battle seven years earlier.

She didn't bother speaking the incantation; it was frivolous and Latin, anyway, and her pronunciation was better without her tongue tripping her up. The glass gently disengaged itself from the wound, dancing up and then falling into the small bowl she'd conjured. The tip of her wand then traced the wound, cleaning and sewing it shut with a thin line of golden magic.

It cut right through the centre of the shadow of an old tattoo, and she tried not to look too closely at it.

She felt his entire body stiffen as her wand traced over the cut and the skull and the serpent; even the hand she gently cradled suddenly felt like a taut rope. She released him without comment as the wound finished knitting itself together. When her eyes met his again, though, she pretended ignorance to the iciness there. "Well?" she questioned. "What do you say?"

He merely continued to glare at her. Perhaps she hadn't been clear.

"I mean, about the practicing," she continued.

There was no doubt about it; the lines around his eyes definitely tightened this time. "You are more foolish—"

"Don't be unreasonable," she snapped, cutting him off. "It's better than throwing things at walls whenever the urge strikes you. You're going to be out a good amount of ink and time if you keep carrying on like _that_."

"I can do _that_alone," he pointed out coldly.

"Oh, so Minerva hasn't expressed concern about your behaviour yet?" she replied crisply. His lips twitched toward a scowl. "Rest assured, she's planning to. It'd be a pleasant-enough way to _pretend_you're interacting with people."

"Pleasant?" he demanded. "It's hardly—"

"Oh, honestly," she scoffed. "You'd get to hex the Head of Gryffindor on a regular basis! What isn't good about that?"

"You talk," he replied with irritation.

She felt a bit hurt by this, but tried not to show it. "You haven't heard hardly anything from me over the past week," she reminded him. His scowl deepened. "And if it means so much to you, I could promise that the only words out of my mouth would be curses."

Silence reigned for a moment, and then he spoke again. "You gain nothing from this," he said, but his voice had at least lost its edge.

She glared up at him. "You're not the only person in this castle who needs to let off some steam, Severus Snape."

He held her gaze, merely contemplating her, his lips a straight line once again, for another moment. "You're volunteering to be nearly killed _often_," he said, as though he had been talked into it, but was interested in talking her out of it.

She shrugged. "I'm sure there's no damage you could do to me that you couldn't fix." At the look he gave her—one that emphasized that he believed her a stupid little girl—she snapped, "Alright, then, there's no damage you would do to me that you couldn't fix. Do we have a deal or not?"

He shook his head. "It's not terribly wise of you."

She turned and walked toward the door. "I've never been known for my wisdom," she said, not bothering to turn and look at him. "Just my propensity for _swallowing textbooks_. Oh, and by the by, it's terribly unfair of you to take points away from a student who has a legitimate query about the procedure of non-verbal spells, so I'll be returning those to Gryffindor after I have a chat with Minerva."

She slammed the door behind her on the way out.


	5. The Value of Knowledge

FIVE

_The Value of Knowledge_

Severus would never admit to it, but he had been a bit taken aback at her use of his name. She seemed so comfortable with it. With the glare, with her hands on her hips, with her throat stretched up as though she was hoping to match his height. Not bloody likely. She was terribly small, terribly frail. And as much as she stayed out of his way, as tiny of a nuisance as she was, she was bothering him.

Being in his own office—once again entertaining the orange puffball that Granger called a cat—was challenging his ability to sit still. He remembered her, coming here, interrupting his drinking, trying to make them into colleagues who were polite to one another. And just next door was the classroom where his rage had gotten the best of him, and he hadn't stopped to think about who he was cursing, and she was very fucking lucky that he hadn't hit her with something worse than a Stunner. The image of her, lying unconscious on the floor, was nearly synonymous with her fainting spell just after he'd woken in the hospital wing seven years ago. Despite the womanly figure, despite the neater hair, she still looked as if she'd been at war for the better part of a year.

He jerked to his feet. He would not remain here and be tortured by thoughts of her while he tried to grade the latest compositions his dunderheaded third years had cobbled together. He'd retire to the staffroom for the night.

The cat followed him, mewing as though hoping to catch his attention.

It was frankly annoying, how often his mind strayed to her. It had been a few days since their confrontation, and she'd given no word as to when she expected to repeat the experience. He found himself moronically musing over the idea at odd moments. The truly irritating thing was that she had a point. For those few moments, stepping back into battle was a sweet relief. It turned off the mindless rage that had begun to consume him at irregular intervals over the past few years. It brought him back to himself.

He pushed open the door to the staffroom, and only years of concealing his emotions kept him from stopping dead in the doorway and leaving. The stack of parchment floating along with him fluttered down to the table, directly across from where Hermione Granger sat, her head cushioned on a textbook, fast asleep. There were a few scrolls of parchment beside her, gently rolling back and forth with every breath she took. She was silent even in sleep.

_No peace_, he thought to himself mutinously.

He approached the table, quietly pulled out the chair across from her, and settled in it, his black eyes still fixed carefully on her face. She made no sign of stirring, and her cat appeared unwilling to wake her; it had leapt onto the table and sat down, watching its mistress with uncanny intelligence. Her wildly curly hair was spread across the textbook and over the table, and her hand was crushed around a piece of crumpled-up parchment. The shadows under her eyes were more noticeable; it was as though her make-up had worn away. His eyes flicked down to the pages of the book, which lay open, and he bit back a curse. The paper was warped, and still newly damp. She'd been crying, and if she woke up, he would have to deal with a potentially emotional witch, which was fairly high up on his list of least favorite things to deal with, right after Albus Dumbledore's portrait.

The cat pounced lightly down into her lap, and she stirred. He immediately looked away, dipping his quill into a bottle of red ink and beginning the marking that he loathed. At least it gave him an excuse not to look at her, to perhaps miss an emotional waterworks entirely.

"Crooks," her voice said sleepily, and the hand holding the crumpled parchment shifted to stroke his fur as she pulled herself upright. The motion stopped short as she realized what she still held, and, with a snort, she lobbed the parchment straight into the fire, where it caught and burned in a matter of seconds. "Oh," she said, her voice startled. "Hello, Professor."

She sounded in control, and so he felt it safe to look up. Her brown eyes were watching his quill slash with vicious lines across the parchment, seeming almost amused. He merely nodded in return, not trusting himself to speak without asking what that display had been about, and bent his head back over the parchment.

A few moments passed as she opened the rolls of parchment that were still lying beside her, breaking the wax seals with soft snaps. There was a stifled gasp, and, annoyed now, he glanced up.

Her fingers played over a slim silver chain and the pendants that hung on it. It was much too short to be a necklace, and he wasn't surprised that she slipped it over her wrist instead. Silver shaped into sparks dotted the line of the bracelet. She glanced up, noticing that he was watching, and he raised an eyebrow in response, eyes returning to the bracelet.

"It's my birthday," she muttered, as though by way of explanation, as though his facial expression had _invited _explanation.

He couldn't resist the opportunity to voice a jibe, however. "I must express my surprise at Weasley's ability to choose anything suitably to your liking."

She flinched, but remained otherwise composed. "It's from Harry. Ron's was the one I tossed in the fire." She glanced quizzically at him, but said nothing further.

His eyes narrowed as his gaze returned to the composition he was grading. He'd been certain that the Potter brat had married the Weasley girl, and a token of affection seemed misplaced if that was the case. He snorted quietly under his breath.

"You don't take the Daily Prophet, do you?" she said, with something like understanding dawning in her voice.

He didn't look up. "I don't see why it's relevant."

His peripheral vision caught her blush. "If you had, you'd have known that Ron and I are…" She hesitated. "Not on good terms anymore," she finished, her voice clearly struggling with control.

He looked up, and for a moment, even though the shadows under her eyes were darker than ever and her hair was all mussed on one side from sleeping on it, he felt a stab of disgust for Weasley that had nothing to do with how idiotic he was and everything to do with his inadequacies where Hermione Granger was concerned.

He blinked. What was _wrong _with him?

"Oh?" he answered politely, no longer trusting himself to say more. The flash of venomous feeling was gone, but its memory left him confused, puzzled. Granger was the same mousy girl she'd always been. Nothing extraordinary about her. Nothing to _defend_, certainly.

"Yes," she replied, now fiddling with the new bracelet. "It was…quite a public fallout, actually. He always has had a problem with keeping his mouth shut." Her face twisted into a pained grimace.

He watched her, intrigued in spite of himself. "I can't say I'm surprised," he said dryly.

She laughed, but it sounded miserable. "I suppose I can't, either."

He laid down his quill, giving in for the moment. "I assume you did the leaving?"

She sighed and looked at the ceiling. "Officially, yes. Unofficially, he should have known he was ending it the instant he couldn't stay out of Pansy Parkinson's pants."

Pansy _Parkinson_?

"Yes," she said, still gazing determinedly upward, as though she couldn't quite bear to meet his gaze. "It came as a bit of a surprise to me, too, to be honest. I didn't think Parkinson would be able to overcome all that nonsense about blood traitors. Apparently she has a thing for redheads." She snorted quietly. "Though it's not surprising that Ron couldn't resist."

He contemplated his own disbelief as he watched her pull her gaze from the ceiling and back down to the scroll of parchment, her eyes scanning Potter's letter.

"You're better off," he pointed out, his voice a bit brusque. "You've never seemed inclined toward settling down and breeding, and the Weasleys have a reputation for that sort of thing."

He had expected a glare for his comment, but he had been incorrect; instead, the same confused, unsteady look overcame her features as it had seven years ago, when he'd first complimented her. This time, it was coupled with a small smile, a slight darkening of her cheeks.

"It wasn't...well, you're right, it wouldn't have worked out," she murmured, and shrugged. "We're not exactly compatible, me and Ron. Good friends, but..."

"I find it difficult to believe that you could even stand his friendship," he muttered, picking up his quill once more. "He's positively insipid."

A thoughtful expression crossed her face. "I suppose it wasn't the most equal thing," she said sensibly. "He and Harry really did take advantage of my intellect at times. But, in the end...it turned out, you know, for the best. They did need me."

"And your reward was to be humiliated publicly. Charming."

"You know better than anyone that those who deserve rewards don't usually get them." Before he could protest that assumption, she continued. "I was angry, certainly, but Harry's on my side, and I think Ron and I will be friends again someday. Not soon, mind you. I don't want to have to suffer through the wedding."

That diverted him entirely. "Wedding?"

"Yes," she said idly, now reading another of the scrolls. "He proposed, you know, and she said yes. Her parents are throwing a royal fit about it, disinheriting her and everything, but she doesn't seem to care. It makes me almost happy for them." A smirk crossed her face. "Though I really wouldn't want to be her right now. Molly's throwing a fit. She wanted me for a daughter, even if I haven't really wanted to marry her son in years." She tapped a finger against her lips. "Marriage is just so silly, I think."

He had to stop her talking. It was all much too much information. Knowing more was making him more interested, and he would be curious later, as much as he hated himself for being curious at all. "Miss Granger—"

"It's Hermione," she interrupted, still reading. "Or if you can't stomach that, Professor Granger. I don't care which, just please, dispose of the Miss."

"_Professor_ Granger, then," he snapped.

"Yes?" she answered, and looking up from the parchment, she smiled.

Infuriating.

"Have you thought of an appropriate place to conduct our duels? I shudder to think of the damage we're bound to do to our offices and classrooms." He frowned. "Or to think of anyone potentially happening upon us, or becoming curious about any wards we set up."

Her face brightened immediately. The delight was tangible. "Oh, no, I've thought of a perfect place," she said happily.

He raised an eyebrow. "Indeed."

"Yes," she continued, seemingly not put off at all by his ominous pronouncement. "The Room of Requirement."

* * *

><p>Hermione couldn't tell if he was pleased or annoyed or simply grimly looking forward to the opportunity to curse her again.<p>

He followed her willingly enough, up flights of stairs after stairs after stairs, their footsteps and swishing robes the only noise in the castle. It was past curfew; students would be holed up in their common rooms for the night. If they weren't…well, she certainly hoped they knew how to be quiet. Severus wasn't bound to be very forgiving.

"It was where we had all the meetings for Dumbledore's Army, you know," she murmured, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the slumbering portraits. "Only way to avoid that…" She stopped short, trying to find a word to describe Dolores Umbridge that didn't sound too terrible.

"Insufferable woman," he finished for her, his voice deep with disgust.

She nearly laughed, but stopped herself just in time. "Yes," she said, her lips twitching. "Truly insufferable."

There was a second of hesitating silence, and then he broke it. "What, exactly, did you do to her?" he asked, and though he sounded utterly bored, she knew that he wouldn't have spoken up at all if he wasn't curious. "She was really very…shaken…after the Headmaster retrieved her."

She felt heat rise to her face at the question; she knew the answer wouldn't put her in a good light. "Well," she began, "I…I had to get us out of that office, you know. She was going to perform the Cruciatus Curse on Harry…" When he didn't interrupt with a snide comment about how it would have done Harry good, she rushed on. "And I remembered…Hagrid had taken us into the forest, to show us where Grawp was, you know, and the centaurs were furious with him—it's not exactly safe, is it, keeping a giant in the forest…but they didn't harm us because we were still children."

He snorted quietly, as though he doubted she had ever been so innocent.

"So I just marched in, making as much noise as possible, and eventually, they found us and carried her off because she was being terribly…insufferable."

She dared a sideways look at him. His lips were pressed together quite firmly. He might have been holding in a chuckle or two—or, at least, she hoped he was.

"Not the most effective scheme, but well enough," he said.

"I mean—I didn't exactly have many _options_, you know, she was about to curse my best friend—and I didn't know how Harry would hold up under torture, seeing as he'd never experienced anything of the sort before that—and I had no idea whether he'd conveyed anything to you at _all _in that pile of gibberish he shouted at you—"

"He'd have been fine," he replied, a note of weariness in his voice. "It might have done some good, too."

She bit her tongue. She'd hate to agree with him on the matter, but, there it was: Umbridge could hardly have killed Harry, and if they had eventually been released with copious punishment, Sirius might still be alive…though Voldemort would have continued on, unexposed, perhaps, had the battle at the Ministry not taken place.

"We need to walk past this stretch of wall three times thinking about what we need," she said, coming to a halt in the seventh floor corridor.

His chin jerked upward once, and then he walked at her side for the three turns. _Place to fight, place where we can't be heard, can't be found_—the litany in her head sounded similar to the one she'd repeated, desperately, during her fifth year.

A door appeared in the solid wall.

"Quickly," he murmured, his eyes darting down the corridor, watchful for movement. His hand wrenched the door open and he allowed her to enter before glancing once again down the hallway. The door snapped shut behind him.

A laugh startled itself from her lips. It was similar to what she remembered, and she assumed that the differences were Severus's making. Gone were the tables of dark detectors, but the place was fuller of books than ever. She recognized a good deal of the Restricted Section, which appeared to have taken up residence on the eastern wall of the room. The floor felt as though it had been equipped with a cushioning charm, which was a good thing indeed; she was bound to be falling down and passing out a lot.

"Intriguing." His voice was close behind her; she shivered at the blatant interest evident in it. "Not what I imagined."

She glanced over her shoulder; he was frowning, eyes scanning the books. "You…hadn't been here before?" she asked hesitantly.

A dark look crossed his face. "No," he said, turning away and striding to the opposite side of the room.

She had clearly touched a nerve, though what it involved, she couldn't imagine. She bit her lip, watching anxiously as he removed his robes and hung them on the tall coat rack beside the fire. How was she to know what might ruin a seemingly decent mood? Having a decent conversation with him was difficult work.

He turned to face her again, and she was immediately distracted from her anxiety. She realized that she had never seen him without about three layers of black wool buttoned to his neck, and it was suddenly necessary to remind herself that he was old enough to be her father, because she felt a sudden, unbidden pull of attraction to the lanky form in front of her.

He was all angles; the cheekbones and jaw and nose just gave away what anyone should have guessed about the rest of his body. All harsh lines, all tensed as if poised to attack. The white buttoned shirt disguised some of those angles, softened them. The fire from the hearth played over his face, making it a study of light and shadow, increasing the sharpness of his features. He was unconventionally handsome, and she had never noticed, and now she felt like more of a teenager than ever. She swallowed, her eyes darted down—anything to keep from meeting his gaze at this moment, because she was going to blush like she'd never blushed before—and she caught sight of the scars.

For a moment, she felt quite lightheaded. Her eyes closed, and she fought down the flashes of memory that returned to her; wave upon wave of desperation, of struggling to heal those very wounds—to keep him alive. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

Only a second had passed and, without looking at him again, she threw off her own robes. He was rolling his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, but she didn't follow suit. Her shirt didn't restrict her movement enough for her to contemplate baring her skin even for a second. She flinched at the very thought, and let her wand fall from her sleeve into her hand.

_We all have scars_, she reminded herself, though it had no more than the usual affect on her self-consciousness of her particular scars.

Her eyes found the dark shadow of a faded tattoo on the inside of his forearm, and she felt a thrill of foreboding coupled with that strange new pull.

She was afraid of him, and yet she found him _attractive_. The thought had her struggling to keep down a giggle; her lips tightened forcefully with the effort to keep it in.

His wand fell into the palm of his hand, and the urge to laugh left her immediately.

"I'll try not to kill you," he said dismissively, and his black eyes were burning, suddenly brimming with so much emotion—so much anger, and so much _pain_—that she couldn't quite reconcile that lightly bored tone with the man he must be.

She nodded tightly, fingers tight around her wand, her breathing shallow.

He cast the first curse, and then she was running.

A protective covering had filmed the walls of books; the curse she dodged was absorbed without any visible effect on the shelves. She had barely twitched out of the way when another jet of red light nearly grazed her shoulder. It had the desired effect; the adrenaline took her, and she was a stampede of action, finally daring to flick back her own curse as she dodged his.

He was much more nimble than she had ever thought possible. Some things left lasting damage, after all, and if the look on his face was any indication, he was in a great deal more pain than she had ever imagined living through. How often had he been tortured, or left to sleep on cold floors, or—

One of his curses hit its mark; her left arm, from shoulder to fingertips, went frighteningly numb. "Keep your head in the battle, Granger," he snapped, and she ducked as another spell sailed from his wand.

_Oh, bugger all. Did you forget he's one of the greatest Legilimens who ever lived?_

A ghastly smile overcame his features. For a moment, he was the terrifying Potions Master of her school days. "Yes," he murmured, "clearly, you did."

She was frantic, but the panic, at least, blanked out her thoughts; she cast spells as they occurred to her, trying not to think, trying to simply feel her way through the battle, but he was much better at this than she was, and he was surely still receiving some advance indication of what she was planning. He moved out of the way, or let her own curse rebound at her, long before it was in danger of touching him. It seemed as though he had a permanent shield, hovering around him protectively. Her spells all sailed wide, giving him a good foot of room without fear of injury...

_How are you _doing _that?_

She crouched as a Stunner sailed over her head, then conjured a hefty slab of stone to protect her from the next curse. If he _was _maintaining a shield—and yet still cursing her so agilely with his wand—

"Are you _always _so easily distracted?" his voice called, irritated; the sound of ricocheting spells had stopped.

She took advantage of the moment to test her theory; popping up, she flicked her wand in his direction.

He didn't move, but the curse didn't strike him, though it was headed straight for his chest; he did flinch, however, as the impact was absorbed by the thin field of magic, nearly transparent, which molded itself around him.

"I don't have a chance in hell, do I," she said flatly, crossing her arms and allowing her wand to point uselessly at the floor. "You're far more brilliant than you let on, you know. Wandless magic? Really? And you're not going to suffer for maintaining it?"

He gave an annoyed sigh. "Stop," he said warningly. "I can see where you're going with this."

"Then get out of my head!" she snapped. "What harm would it do?" she added, a plea in her voice.

"I refuse to put myself in the unreasonably difficult role of your teacher ever again, Granger," he returned, raising his wand.

It stung, but she was more annoyed than hurt. "I don't see what was ever so unreasonably difficult about it," she said heatedly.

He fired a curse; as she dodged, she snapped one back, two resounding cracks echoing around them as the powerful spells hit the walls.

"Honestly!" she cried. "I'm quick to learn—maybe I'm not terribly inventive—but I was never exactly provided an example of how to _become _inventive—"

Another curse, another dodge, another return. This time he cringed, his teeth locked in a pained grimace, as his shield absorbed the impact.

"I'd be better at learning than Harry," she said desperately, and darted behind her stone slab again as a jet of light made a beeline for her; some of the stone crumbled at the impact. "I have no blood feud with you, no grudge against you, it's not like I'm going to be glaring at you and provoking you the whole time—"

Silence reigned, aside from a faint _pop_; when she looked up, his wand was pointed at the floor, his eyes narrowed. She bit her lip, watching, her fingers still tight around her wand, her heart racing.

"I have no _interest_ in teaching you," he said darkly.

"I won't argue!" she protested. "I won't disagree, I'll do whatever you say, whatever method you think is best—"

"Is knowledge so valuable to you?" he questioned sarcastically. "That you would deign to follow instructions to keep your mouth shut?"

"I'll never be able to best you if I don't learn something further," she insisted, feeling it was safe to straighten up now. "You have a few obvious advantages."

"You're never going to need those advantages," he pointed out. "We're not at war anymore. I doubt we will be again in our lifetimes."

"You're wrong."

His black gaze found hers.

"Look at us," she whispered. "What's the use in pretending? We are still at war. It's just not an enemy as tangible as Voldemort." He flinched at the name, his hand automatically straying to the faded Dark Mark. "It's ourselves."

He shook his head, lips turning in a snarl. "Don't assume—"

"Fine," she snapped, "I won't. But I want to learn. And as I doubt it's a theory I can learn just from a book, I want you to teach me. Please." When he looked on the verge of denying her again, she asked, her voice quiet, "What else do you have to do? Sit in your office and be tormented by my cat? It would be a _challenge_, compared to the idiots you usually deal with. It could be interesting."

Hermione knew that this was a reach. She knew that he found nothing _interesting _about interacting with anyone. She simply hoped that he was bored enough—and yes, maybe lonely enough—that he would be unable to resist the idea of having someone to torment…to talk to…she felt an absurd spark of hope in her chest, a light in the loneliness of the last few years, a desperate wish that perhaps Severus Snape, of all people, would be capable of a friendship with her. An equal one. No matter how poorly he had treated her as a student…well, she was desperate, wasn't she? And he was changed. And they shared a singular event in their lives that had connected them anyway, however unwillingly.

At long last, he spoke.

"Occlumency first," he said, a note of resignation in his voice. "You need to learn how to keep me out if you're ever to have the _slightest _chance of surviving a duel unscathed."

She ducked her head to hide her smile, but hoped that he had glimpsed it, anyway.


	6. The Dangers of Occlumency

SIX

_The Dangers of Occlumency_

_Dear Hermione—_

_Don't mind my brother, I've told him he'd being a first-class prat and that if he had any decency at all he'd let you alone. George has already given him a black eye and is refusing to sell him any of that clever bruise-healing paste they have. And don't even get me started on how furious Harry is. He's positively livid that Ron would even try to be in touch with you at this date. You've got us all watching out for you, 'Mione, and we're all on your side. I wonder how Mum's even going to manage to stomach the wedding._

_I hope you're enjoying yourself at Hogwarts. Neville mentioned in his last letter that you looked a bit peaky, but I suppose that's to be expected, isn't it? You work too hard, we all say so. The brats don't need all their compositions back right away; give yourself some time to relax._

_I absolutely hate my body at the moment. This one's being so much more difficult than the last. I swear we're breeding a monster, Hermione. Harry just won't let go of this stubborn notion to really _thank _Snape. Albus Severus Potter, don't you think that's the name of a child who just gets picked on? It means so much to him, I just haven't the heart to disagree. I can only hope that the combination of the names of two of the greatest wizards who ever lived will be enough to keep the bullies at bay. Then again, he might just manage on his own. He's kicking something terrible at the moment. He's a Slytherin, I can already tell. Mum and Dad will be horrified._

_Speaking of Slytherins, is there any chance you'd be able to persuade Snape to come to the naming ceremony? I know it's far off, but I reckon if you're going to have any chance at all, you're going to have to start getting in his good graces straight away. And it would mean so much to Harry, if he just turned up and sat in a chair and just watched. I'll keep Harry from forcing the poor man to speak to him, I swear, but will you try, 'Mione? I reckon you have a better chance than any of us. I'm not due until late December, which gives you about three months._

_I seriously hope you're well. We all miss having you near so much, Hermione. I'll have to visit soon, but I don't want to intrude—let me know if there's a good time for it, will you?_

_Lots of love,_

_Ginny_

Hermione felt herself smile at the thought of a visit from the youngest Weasley. Ginny brought with her a life and energy that would be welcome, considering the gloom of the dungeon she currently inhabited. She had no misgivings on the subject of persuading Snape to come to the naming ceremony, though; even if she did somehow win any portion of his affection by December, chances were low. He wanted nothing to do with Harry. He had made that much very clear.

She sighed and pulled a scrap of parchment toward her. If she could afford a break from the compositions, anyway, she might as well see if tonight was a good time to start Occlumency lessons. She scribbled out a message and slipped it under the collar of the cat curled in her lap. "Go to Snape, will you?" she yawned. "I might as well make a whole-hearted effort at befriending him."

Crookshanks willingly leapt from her lap and slipped out the office door. Hermione pulled a stack of compositions toward her to begin grading while she waited for a reply.

* * *

><p>How the damned cat managed to get inside, he had no idea.<p>

In honour of the wonders of Friday, and relishing in two days ahead of him not requiring him to deal with the brats called _students_, his tumbler was full of a well-aged brandy. The fire in the hearth washed over his body, giving some relief to the ache that intensified throughout the week and flared up most noticeably at night, when the castle was at its coldest. His collar was loosened, and he welcomed the air that breathed against Nagini's scars, soothing the chafe that his many layers of black wool had imposed over the week. All was routine, all was as it should be, and then—

The hideous orange beast leapt lightly into his lap with a purr of greeting.

He glanced over his shoulder, eyes narrowed. The passage to his office was closed tightly, the wards still intact, and yet the monster had managed to get in somehow. With a heavy sigh, he replaced the decanter on the side table and pulled the scrap of parchment from beneath the creature's collar. It settled into his lap, purring with full force now, as he unfolded the note.

Her script was tiny, neat, and perfectly legible.

_S.S.—_

_Do you have an hour or so free tonight in which we might begin my Occlumency lessons?_

—_H.G._

"Damn it, girl," he muttered, his fingers lifting to massage his temples.

He wanted, with the full force of his desires, to tell her simply _no_. To say no to everything she was asking of him, everything she was looking for from him. It would only lead to more difficulties within these castle walls, for at some point, and he could not be sure how soon it would be, he would say something or do something that was utterly unforgivable to her. She would be furious with him or disappointed with him, and there would be one more person in this castle who considered his presence intolerable.

With another sigh, he picked up the cat and his brandy and prowled toward the cabinet where he kept Dumbledore's Pensieve. Putting down cat and brandy on the table beside the cabinet, he lifted the device carefully out of its hiding place. Crookshanks—gods, he must be tired, for the name of Granger's beast came to mind unbidden—kept his distance, ears laid flat against the back of his head as the Pensieve was set down.

He hesitated for only a second before putting his wand to his temple and drawing out the silvery, delicate thread of his memory. Leaning down, he deposited it into the stone basin, where it swirled and joined the other strange materials within. The glassy surface became a window. He leaned down further, preparing himself for the lurch of falling.

The Room of Requirement had been a place he had avoided; during his school days, he had known of its existence, but had been sure that Potter and his gang had known of it, too. He would never risk straying across their path just out of curiosity for the place. His adult years in the castle had not given him reason to seek it out. It was just another room, one which most students were not aware of, and had therefore never given him incentive to search it during patrols. He didn't visit the seventh floor at all if he could help it. There were far too many raw memories there, and he had no desire to revisit any of them.

The Room was less interesting to him at the moment, though, than the play of emotions across Granger's face. She was an open book; perhaps not as obvious as someone like the Boy Who Wouldn't Die, he could still read the subtle flickers of feeling betrayed by her features. Anxiety: she was watching him with worry while he turned to the side to remove his robes. His curt tone had undoubtedly been the cause of it. There was a hint of frustration, too—perhaps with him. Perhaps because they'd been having a reasonably polite conversation until that moment, when her curiosity had required him to keep her at a distance.

As he turned back to face her, her expression changed, became blank with something like surprise. For a fraction of a second, her eyes remained fixed on his face; then she swallowed and glanced down, the lightest of pink in her cheeks. She was embarrassed, but he couldn't imagine why, and her next action distracted him from any contemplation of the matter. She didn't follow suit in rolling up her sleeves, and her expression hardened again as she watched him do so.

She hadn't bared her arms a single time in company since her arrival at this castle, if he recalled correctly, and he was certain that he did. He would have to examine some older memories in greater detail, but he didn't remember her rolling back her sleeves at any point during her belated seventh year, either, even when many of her classmates had done so due to the effort of advanced Defence work. She was hiding something—whatever it was he'd glimpsed the day he'd visited her office, he was certain. He felt a momentary pang of foreboding; self-harm was uncommon in the Wizarding world, but she had not always been a witch...

He shook the thought away as he watched their battle, analysing her weaknesses. She was very much out of practice, that much was obvious, but still—he admitted it grudgingly—quite good. She had a grace and intellect in battle that many lacked, a subtlety; possibly because of her ability to swallow textbooks, she rarely cast the same curse twice, and was even acceptably inventive. Conjuring natural barriers to use as shields did not occur to just anyone.

They were arguing now, her voice rising, and then she was pleading. The change was almost instantaneous. Her near-shout had dropped to a whisper, and if he put himself in the path of her gaze, close to where his memory-self stood, he could see exactly why he had given in to her request.

Her eyes were begging. Chocolate-brown and open, vulnerable, _hurting—_the depth of the pain in her gaze was tangible, and it wrenched him to his core yet again. No one had willingly made themselves so weak in his presence, so open to his wrath. No one had even attempted to invest that much open faith in him. It was a small thing—just a request to learn—but she was inviting his scorn, his wrath, knowing full well that those were more likely than any sort of _empathy_.

If he was honest with himself, it was not just her vulnerability which had swayed his decision. It was the pain. The way she looked at him as though, in that moment, she was being eaten alive. As he hesitated on the verge of mocking her, the smallest of hopes appeared in her features, a desperate wish that he would agree to it. As if it would somehow ease the pain.

A small smile appeared on her lips as he resigned himself to the task, and though she ducked her head to hide it, he saw it anyway: relief.

He jerked out of the memory. Crookshanks made a quiet noise, and chanced moving nearer to Severus in order to gently bump his furry head against the dark man's hip. Automatically, giving in, his hand dropped to the beast's head. It gave a quiet meow, arching into his fingers, and gazed up at him with yellow eyes.

He summoned the parchment to him and scrawled his reply.

* * *

><p>Hermione was deep in grading compositions when Crookshanks finally returned. She had carefully not thought about what the reply to her message might be—if he had thought better of the whole arrangement, she did not want to get her hopes up too much—but the instant the cat slipped into her office she was anxious to see what his answer was.<p>

Crookshanks mewed angrily as she removed the parchment from beneath his collar and unfolded it without bothering to pet him.

_Present yourself at my office at nine o'clock. Do not be late._

She sank back into her chair in relief and buried her face in her hands. Crookshanks, recovering from his resentment, curled up on her bare feet, warming her toes. Part of her was quite terrified at the prospect of Severus Snape doing any digging at all in her brain, and another part of her was quite interested in the process. She had done some reading-up on the matter, years ago, but with no one to test her, she could hardly be sure that she would have any success.

She would be restless the rest of the evening. If she was honest with herself, the compositions didn't need to be graded right now—they had only just been turned in to day. She was bound to be distracted and potentially unfair to her students if she tried to keep working.

With a sigh, she pushed back from her desk and made her way into her quarters. A bath sounded lovely. It would give her an opportunity to relax and hopefully unwind before having her mind broken into. She bit her lip at the thought, and tried to hope for the best as she stripped out of her clothes and sank into the claw-footed tub in her bathroom. Crookshanks plopped himself just inside the doorway, stretching himself out on the cool tile.

The warm water was soothing, the bubbles fragrant, but even as she settled in with her head pleasantly cushioned on the rim of the tub, she felt fidgety. It was nothing out of the ordinary; sitting still did not come easily to Hermione, and it never had. Every moment not spent being productive was a moment wasted. This philosophy tended to create more stress than it eased, however, and she was making a real effort to take time to just sit idly.

Sitting idly gave her more space to think, however, and she was never pleased with the direction her thoughts usually strayed. She took a deep breath and let it out before pulling her left arm out of the water and letting it rest along the rim of the tub, her head tilting sideways to look unwillingly at her bare skin.

_Mudblood_.

The word stared at her. Her screams, faint and tinny in her ears, echoed back at her. Her eyes fell closed, but the scar was etched into her eyelids. _Mudblood. Mudblood. Mudblood._

Bellatrix Lestrange was seven years cold in her grave, but she had left her mark.

Hermione had always thought rather much of herself until that night she'd been tortured, and since, she had thought rather little. The Cruciatus Curse had been nothing compared to the psychological horror of having derogatory slang carved into her flesh. She could only be grateful that she had not been asked more pressing questions, that the truth had been acceptable to scream out during those minutes which seemed more like hours. She would not have had the strength to do anything but tell the truth. She would have been quite incapable of lying while pain and panic blinded her.

Ron had always given her space about this particular scar. He'd never asked, for example, why it looked so very _permanent_, or why fainter scars criss-crossed through the words. When they'd started sleeping together she had managed to keep the lights off, and he had gone along with it—until the day when he had wanted the lights on, and she could still remember the look of horror in his eyes as he really looked at her body for the first time.

There were the scars wrapped around her ribs and chest, for example: thin and whip-like from the curse she'd been felled with in the Department of Mysteries. There were slightly thicker marks on her back from the night that Dumbledore had died. There was a slim line on her throat, where Bellatrix Lestrange had held a knife to her flesh. On men, scars were marks of bravery; on Ron, the scars left from a brain's tentacles made him courageous, debonair. But underneath a woman's clothes, even her oldest friend expected smooth, uninterrupted skin, not the marks of battles past.

Her fingers trembled as they traced the letters. Crookshanks made a noise from the doorway—half-worried, half-admonishing.

"Not to worry, Crooks," she mumbled. "My days of acting on teenage angst are long past."

She held her breath and dunked her head beneath the surface of the water, firmly putting an end to her dark thoughts.

* * *

><p>The knock at his office door came at precisely nine o'clock.<p>

"Enter," Severus intoned, rising from his desk as he spoke.

Granger slipped inside, closing the door softly behind her. The draft that followed her in hit him with the full force of her scent—some combination of vanilla and apple. She was dressed casually—jeans rather than a skirt paired with her starched white shirt—and he noticed her eyes linger on his rolled-up shirtsleeves before meeting his gaze.

Yes, she was certainly hiding something, and if she was as bad at Occlumency as Potter had been, he would find out exactly what.

"I assume you have a basic understanding of Occlumency?" he questioned.

She nodded. "Yes." She appeared on the verge of further explanation, but kept her mouth shut.

He raised his eyebrows. "Go on."

There was the smallest look of relief as she was granted permission to say exactly what she knew on the subject. "It's very subtle," she began. "The goal is, however, fairly straightforward: to keep any accomplished Legilimens from gaining access to your thoughts, memories, and emotions. To do so, one must erect a fairly powerful mental barrier. It's not something which is best accomplished with wandwork, from what I've gathered."

He nodded. "Sufficient. But theory will only take you so far in this field, and learning by example is usually most effective." He lifted his wand. "Wand at the ready. Use any means that occurs to you to block me."

She lifted her wand, but her stance was utterly relaxed, tension absent from the line of her shoulders. She did nothing to avoid his gaze, merely stared into his face with open golden-brown eyes, seemingly at peace with what was about to happen.

He uttered the incantation. "_Legilimens_."

He felt her hasty, weak mental barrier—product only of practice without being tested—and crushed it with ease, letting her thoughts and emotions flood into his mind.

She was as unlike Potter as possible in this very fundamental way. Penetrating the brat's mind had been like unstopping a dam, each thought provoking a quick leap to the next, to the associated memory, to the attached emotion, to another memory coupled with another thought. Breaking into Granger's mind, however, was almost calming. Even in this, the most abstract of places, she was organized. Her thoughts were a calm, singular current—for the moment.

_Keep him out—_

There was a surge of panic, a rustle in the calm, as she detected the breach; she'd been unaware that her barrier had fallen. He slipped past her attempts to build a new one and followed the panic.

_Things you don't want him to see—_

A flash; the memory was recent, but vague; she was trying not to think, keeping all mental activity brief, in her attempt to shield herself. He caught the scent of her, stronger in the memory, the vague image of a bare arm, of scars—her panic became terror, solidified into mind-numbing horror—

There was a very strong push, and he was locked out.

Well. Impressive.

He blinked, and became aware of her eyes staring into his again: her gaze was vacant, and he knew that she was still focusing all of her strength on maintaining the barrier. She had been relaxed before, but every line of her body was tense now.

"Relax," he said curtly. "I'm out."

A smile flickered across her lips before she smothered it. "I don't suppose you were trying very hard," she said ruefully, shifting her weight to her other foot.

"Still, it was a decent attempt. You won't always be able to just construct walls, however. Your opponent will always know you're hiding something."

She sighed. "Yes, that makes sense."

"For now, though, it is a useful exercise. Eventually, you will construct a more...permanent...wall."

Her eyebrows furrowed. "Permanent?"

"Think, Granger."

She thought, still looking at him absent-mindedly, her teeth digging into her lower lip.

"I see the purpose," she said finally. "I just don't see how it would be possible to maintain it _permanently_. It took all my effort just to hold the temporary one, and I'm sure my physical appearance was a dead give-away that I was trying to maintain it."

"It becomes second nature," he said dismissively.

She looked as if she didn't believe him, but held her tongue.

He lifted his wand. "Again. Since you have a grasp of the idea, disregard your wand."

She slid it back into her sleeve, looking not at all worried about facing an opponent unarmed.

"_Legilimens_."

The first wall fell to his assault; the second creaked with the force, and then gave way. Her mind was still so carefully organized, so he followed the slow stream of her panic.

_Walls, walls, walls—_

The soft feeling of flesh on flesh, mumbled words in her ear, dull pleasure—he recoiled, feeling no interest in her more physical relationship with Weasley, and she took the opportunity of his hesitation to put up another wall, a little sturdier. It still was not strong enough to keep him out for long; with a slightly greater effort, he regained access.

She was curled up crying on a bathroom floor, but not at Hogwarts; her sobs were muffled by her arms, her entire body trembling—he thrust aside her attempt to block him with force this time, and she scrambled to recover—her memory unlocked itself, unstopping a flood of connected moments like this one with the panic—Weasley on the ground, bleeding—Weasley in a state of undress, a look of horror on his face—Weasley in _her _bed with Parkinson—silent crying again—

_Shove_.

He pushed back; the barrier was fragile. Her memories were weakening rather than strengthening her resolve.

When he unlocked her mind again, however, the flood was gone, calmed again into the slow stream. She'd put a lid on her fear and there were no thoughts to follow, so he hunted deeper, searching out the scent of the first memory he'd seen in her head.

It was still vague. She wasn't thinking of it—her mind shouted with her determination not to think of it—but the general image was there. Pain in her chest. Eyes tracing letters. Self-loathing and inadequacy and the beginning of a flashback before she brought herself back to the present. All while focused on the letters, blurred letters on her forearm...

The push was not a shove this time; it was a Stunner to the chest, though she hadn't lifted her wand. He was expelled from her mind and nearly lost his balance, catching the edge of his desk just in time. Her eyes were filled with horror, but she didn't speak, just breathing hard with the effort it had cost her to repel him, steadying herself against the chair in front of his desk, seemingly unable to look away from his gaze. She was clearly significantly weakened by the assault; she was struggling to remain on her feet.

He moved around the desk just in time. Her eyelids fluttered, and her knees gave way. His outstretched arm caught her before she could collapse and kept her upright.

"If I support you, can you walk?" he questioned.

She merely nodded, her face turned into his shoulder, eyes shut tight. A shudder racked her thin form. He urged her forward, unlocking the bookshelf and the wards leading to his rooms. Her feet shuffled along, moving in the direction he towed her. He only paused to deposit her in his usual armchair, nearest the hearth, and then moved on to another set of cabinets, where his stock of potions were kept.

Only one of the vials would be of use, and it would only ease the physical symptoms of her mental duress. There was no use in instigating repair of her mind; she would gain no strength, would learn no immunity, if he attempted to do so.

By the time he returned to her side, she had curled up in his armchair, her arms wrapped around her legs, which were pulled tight to her chest. She was shivering visibly. He flicked his wand at the hearth, and a fire sprung up, its heat washing over them. "Take this," he said, holding the vial out to her.

Her eyes regarded it with suspicion. "What is it?"

"It will ease your physical discomfort."

For a moment, she shivered so hard that her teeth rattled. "W-why?"

He suppressed a growl. "Because," he said darkly, "I daresay we pushed your limited knowledge of the matter too far for a first sitting. You would not normally take anything to relieve the symptoms, but this is an exception. The stress of expelling me with your mind has had unwanted side effects."

He knew before she spoke what she would say; her mouth was set in a stubborn line, now that she had locked her teeth together to keep them from chattering. "No," she said, her knuckles white with the pressure of locking them around her legs. "I'm sure it will pass soon, won't it? And it will help me build up some resistance to the physical side effects."

For a moment, he felt compelled to force her to swallow the potion, but whether she knew it or not, she was right. It would be easier to resist succumbing to the physical display of mental damage in the future if she learned to fight it now. He nodded curtly, pocketing the vial. "As you wish."

He seated himself in the remaining armchair, facing her to keep watch on her symptoms. The shaking was lessening, though if her locked jaw was any indication, that was merely a product of her force of will. He felt a grudging respect for her.

"I'm not going to die if you stop looking at me," she said, a last violent tremor ripping through her as she relaxed her body enough to talk. Her eyes avoided his.

"I will not risk the event, as unlikely as it may be," he said smoothly. "Minerva would kill me outright for having a hand in the murder of her favourite student."

She choked out a laugh. "Yes, I suppose she would." She paused, taking a deep breath. "I stopped in to see her as I was on my way here. She was quite pleased to hear that you'd be socializing with someone tonight. Merry, even."

"Indeed," he said darkly.

She let out a relieved sigh and uncurled her limbs, wincing as her legs stretched. "Is it usually that bad?" she asked, her nose wrinkling.

"No," he said curtly. "But you were quite desperate in your attempt to hide that particular memory, and it gave you enough force to lock me out, at the expense of sapping your physical energy."

She grimaced, staring into the fire.

He summoned the bottle of brandy and poured out a measure in two decanters, levitating one toward her. "You'll need to learn how to keep me out in a way that doesn't do great damage to your energy reserves," he said as she took the glass from mid-air.

She smiled ruefully. "I suppose I will, at the risk of being invited into your quarters and given an expensive drink ever again."

She was teasing, and it caught him by surprise; he couldn't suppress a smirk as he lifted his own glass to his lips, drinking a deep gulp of the burning alcohol.

Her eyes wandered the walls as she set down her glass. "Books," she noted. "I might have guessed."

"You are dangerously obvious in your attempts to stray off-topic."

She winced.

"It reveals exactly how dangerous you believe that memory to be," he continued, his voice harsh.

Her eyes fell to her lap.

"Which leads me to consider how dangerous it truthfully is." He watched her as she fidgeted. "You weren't nearly so worried about any that contained the ginger menace."

She snorted, and her hand flew to her mouth as her shoulders shook. Her eyes lifted to meet his. It was merriment, not distress, that had her in fits. "I'm sorry," she managed to snicker, as a giggle escaped her lips. "It's just...what was that, that you called Ron?" She snickered again, tears of mirth pooling in her eyes.

He scowled at her, but it made no impression; she was doubled over, shaking with silent laughter, struggling to contain herself. "I believe it an apt description," he said dryly.

"Oh, it is!" she cried, laughter bubbling out of her now. "Absolutely fantastic! I _must _tell Harry and Ginny—they'll be delighted to have something new to call him..."

She got herself under control after another minute of glaring, but was still smiling as she met his gaze. "I'm sorry," she apologized. "I wasn't laughing at you, honestly. It's just been a while since I've had the occasion for a good laugh." She took a deep breath, her features smoothing. "And as for the memory, I suppose you're going to demand to know what it contains? You saw enough to have a good guess, I'd wager."

Her features were untroubled, but the mirth in her eyes was giving way to anxiety.

"Are you a danger to yourself, Granger?" he asked bluntly. "Are you so beside yourself with despair over your wayward lover that you would do yourself harm?"

She rolled her eyes as she got to her feet. "The scar is old," she returned, her voice just as straightforward as his. She moved toward him, rolling up her left sleeve, and turned her arm up for his inspection.

The word was carved there, raggedly, older and lighter scars criss-crossed through it, but the word itself was cut deepest, most permanent. _Mudblood_. He stood, taking her wrist in his hand—she flinched at the contact—to look closer.

"Who did this?" he questioned, his curiosity nearly consuming him, but his voice smooth with indifference.

Her chin jerked upward; she glanced at him in surprise. "Bellatrix Lestrange," she murmured. "I'm surprised you hadn't heard her methods. I believe that _Crucio _was no longer sufficient in satisfying her bloodlust."

His finger traced the thinner scars, and she shuddered. "And the rest?"

She nodded. "Me. My seventh year."

"What were you thinking?" he said softly, his voice dangerous.

"That if I cut deep enough, I could cut it away," she replied, her voice just as soft, but thick with sadness.

His proximity to her burned; her scent filled his lungs, clouded his head.

"Don't mention it to anyone, would you?" she asked quietly. "It's a rather embarrassing weakness, and I can only imagine with horror the fuss that Harry and Ginny would make if they caught wind of it."

"Your errant lover has seen the scar," he pointed out, raising an eyebrow.

She smiled weakly. "He's not as thick as you think, but he never looked closely enough to decide that someone other than Bellatrix Lestrange had left the mark. He hated my scars—hated looking at them."

He nodded. "Very well. It could be healed, however. You _are _a witch."

She looked up at him, her eyes dark. "Yes," she murmured. "But sometimes I forget, and this reminds me. I fought with everything I had for my place in this world. Even against myself. I'd like the reminder that I came out on top."

He released her arm. "Inane sentimentality."

"Fitting, for a Gryffindor," she said with a forced smile, and scooped up her glass to drain it.

He disregarded her statement. "We'll continue next week. Same time. Practice emptying your mind of all thoughts and emotions before you sleep. Do you usually dream?" She nodded. "The judge of your success will be whether that continues."

She nodded again and allowed him to escort her back through the bookshelf to the door of his office, where she turned to face him again.

"Thank you for agreeing to this," she said quietly, her voice sincere. "Good night, Severus."

She was gone before he could reply, and he was left with her scent lingering in his quarters, the imprint of her body in his armchair; thoughts of the woman she had become lingered in his mind like fluttering, winged distractions as the night deepened around him.

The remnant of her laughter seemed to echo in the silence.

It had been a long time since he had made anyone laugh.


	7. The Potions Storeroom

SEVEN

_The Potions Storeroom_

"How is he really, do you think, Hermione?"

Hermione personally felt much too jarred by the night before to even consider that she might have a reasonable answer to this question. She took a sip of tea to prolong the moment in which she might have time to think, time to consider how much she should say and how much she should keep to herself, while Minerva watched her with concern.

"Very lonely," she answered at last, "but he has no idea. He doesn't remember what it's like, not being lonely, I think."

"My boy," a tired voice murmured from above them, and the two witches looked up; Dumbledore shook his head from his portrait, his eyes remarkably saddened. "I do wish he would allow me to speak to him."

Hermione ducked her head to hide her scowl. _It's half your fault, you meddling old fool_, she thought with venom.

"You are right to be angry with me, Hermione," his voice said gently. "I did Severus a great deal of damage. He has suffered much too deeply for a man his age. Had there been another way..."

Minerva's lips were a thin line; she, too, carefully avoided eye contact with her predecessor.

"But he's right, of course," Hermione murmured. "There wasn't another way. Severus would have been found and killed right off had Voldemort realized he was a deserter, and he was already...well, he's certainly never been the picture of mental health. It's still regrettable." She glanced up at her former Headmaster. "He won't speak to you?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Not since the day he regained consciousness after the final battle. He was...displeased, to say the least, that he had survived. But he is not a coward, so he would not end his life himself...and thus he is, it would seem, merely existing."

_Existing_.

Her breath caught on the memory of his fingers wrapping around her wrist, the barest of feather-light touches on the scar she'd hidden from everyone but had been unable to keep a secret from him. The way his black eyes burned into hers as he questioned her, methodically, and she answered as though under the influence of Veritaserum. It was that damn voice, that smooth-as-crushed-velvet voice which compelled her to tell truths she didn't wish to divulge. Combined with his touch, it coaxed her flesh into goosebumps. She very nearly shivered at the memory.

_You weren't nearly so worried about any that contained the ginger menace._

She snickered, and both Dumbledore and Minerva looked at her with alarm.

"I'm...I'm sorry," she said, failing to suppress a smile. "It's just...did you know, he has a sense of humour?"

Portrait and witch continued to stare at her.

"I suppose it was just an idle comment, but he called Ron a 'ginger menace'," she said, managing to stifle further chuckles.

Dumbledore laughed merrily, and Minerva's lips at least curved upward, however unwillingly.

"But how are you, my dear?" the older witch asked, reaching out to cover Hermione's hand with her own as Dumbledore's laughter died to chuckles. "I must confess, I have similar worries for both Severus and yourself."

The humour disappeared immediately; Hermione had to force her smile. "I'm fine, Minerva. You worry too much."

Her former Transfiguration Professor watched her with beady eyes.

"All right," she relented, "I suppose I'm a bit lonely, too. I'm not used to being so far from Harry and Ginny, and it's not like I can just pop in, they're both busy. And I'm not used to being...well...the Burrow has always been sort of a second home, and now it's terribly awkward to visit, because Ron's there, of course, and everyone goes all cold toward him while I'm there. It just isn't a good environment. But I love it here," she added. "I love being back at Hogwarts. I wouldn't change it for the world. I'm just trying to readjust to things."

Minerva nodded, patting her hand. "Of course, dear. And don't hesitate, if you need anything. We're all so happy to have you back."

"Thank you, Minerva." She tried to smile again as she set down her cup of tea. "I'm going to go along to the greenhouses—Neville's got some ingredients I need to see to."

The older witch nodded. "Of course. And remember, Hermione. Anything at all."

"Thank you," she murmured again, and made her way out.

* * *

><p>"I must confess, I find myself entertaining a rather promising idea."<p>

Minerva glanced up at Dumbledore. He had spoken the instant the door clicked shut, and he looked absurdly pleased—hopeful, even.

"Oh?" she returned warily. She was not inclined to go along with the majority of schemes that Dumbledore concocted while his essence lived in that portrait, but she suspected that he might be thinking along the same lines as her own half-formed plan.

"Yes," he said happily. "A rather promising idea indeed."

* * *

><p>"<em>Hello?"<em>

_What a foolish thing to do. It wasn't as if he could answer, were he still alive. Her heart wrenched in her chest at the thought that he had not survived in her absence. She hadn't slept or taken time to eat in too long—so long ago it seemed impossible to remember—but she couldn't pause. His life was at stake. She had to reach him in time..._

_The Shrieking Shack was as terrifying as it had been when she was a third year. The place creaked with every step. She tread lightly, her wand at the ready, just in case an errant Death Eater was lying in wait._

_When she reached the correct room, she immediately dropped to her knees beside him, fingers desperately searching out a pulse. It was there, but faint, dreadfully faint. _

He could die right here while I watched.

_The thought sickened her. "Hold on, Professor," she murmured, digging around in her pockets for the potions that she'd picked up before leaving Hogwarts at a dead sprint. Hands shaking, she uncorked a vial and poured it down his throat, watching in dismay as the slow trickle of blood seeped from his wounds._

"_I have to move you," she whispered, reaching out to brush the inky-black hair back from his face, so pale and still. She couldn't do anything on the dusty floor of this terrifying place; it would be healthier, easier, to heal him at the castle. "I have to get you to Hogwarts."_

_Strong fingers closed around her wrist in a vice-like grip, and she screamed, trying to wrench herself away, but he was strong for a man almost dead. Midnight eyes stared up at her out of the face of a corpse._

"_I'm dead whatever you do, Granger."_

Hermione woke up with a soft yelp, starting upright and staring around her wildly. She half-expected to see an emaciated Snape lying at her feet, but there was no such vision. She was safely ensconced in her favourite corner of the Restricted Section, buried in Potions manuals, and she must have dozed off halfway through a particularly in-depth treatise. It involved the after-effects of the Unforgivable Curses—those which were not fatal—and especially the Cruciatus Curse, which had left a lasting affect on many war veterans.

Feeling slightly ill, she scanned the words, trying to chase the dream-image from her mind. His words haunted her. He'd said no such thing at the actual event, of course—nor had he shown any real signs of life until twenty-four hours later—but her dreams regularly featured this, a twisting of the reality that had been.

A shudder rippled through her. She played with the charms on the bracelet Harry had sent her, biting her lip, and finally decided to put the treatise away. It had obviously been the cause of her subconscious mind drifting so quickly to this particular nightmare. She ignored the sensible voice in her head that told her, in no uncertain terms, that the treatise had hardly been the cause; she'd been having that nightmare for years.

She closed the text and pulled out her letter from Harry, the one he'd written her on her birthday. It was short—he had never been particularly loquacious—but heartfelt. That was the wonderful thing about her best friend. The missives he wrote her were always heartfelt.

_Dear Hermione,_

_Happy birthday! I'll have you know that no, I did not just send you some sentimental trinket to mark the occasion. I know that you haven't been sleeping well (I'm not blind, you know), and this should help. It's charmed with a spell we've been working on in the department for war veterans particularly, as we've noticed a distinct interruption of everyone's sleep patterns since Voldemort fell. It certainly isn't foolproof, but it should help, Hermione, and I hope you use it._

_It's busy as ever here, but honestly, I'm driving everyone bonkers with how distracted I've been. I keep accidentally setting things on fire or making champagne burst from the nearest inkwell. I'm always thinking about being home with Ginny when my mind ought to be safely at the office, but it's difficult. She's uncomfortable so often. Albus Severus is going to be one hell of a kid, I can tell you that. Ginny keeps threatening—in her most pained moments, I'm sure—that he's a Slytherin, but I suppose I'd be all right with that._

_How is everything at Hogwarts? Did you convey my message to Professor Snape? Did he chuck you out of his office for it? I'm sorry if he did. I'm honestly at my wit's end with the blighter. You'd think that a person who's been ignored, by and large, his entire life, would enjoy a present or two, but all I get is howlers. And you'd think he might enjoy some company, so I keep inviting him to tea. I won't have any quills left if the barrage continues._

_Take care of yourself, Hermione, and stay in touch. I'll be up to visit soon._

_Love,_

_Harry_

Hermione sighed. She'd have to tell him in her next letter that it certainly wasn't foolproof. Her nightmares had not changed in frequency since she'd received his gift, nor had she managed to get more sleep. It was quite pretty, though, and she enjoyed the random, tinkling music the charms made as they brushed gently against one another.

She needed something to do, preferably hard work with her hands, the kind that dulled the assault of thoughts from her mind. She tapped her quill against her lips, thinking. Her storeroom hadn't yet been organized with the onslaught of students and lessons. Slughorn certainly hadn't bothered to organize the place before he retired, though truthfully, she wasn't certain that she knew the best system of managing all of those ingredients—she'd completed her Mastery on the fly, without a lot of proper lessons, and while she would do an adequate enough job, she was certain there was someone who could do better.

Hermione replaced the books she'd taken down and, preparing herself for an unenthusiastic greeting, went to fetch a certain former Potions Master to help her.

* * *

><p>If Severus had been a different sort of man, he would be humming tunelessly under his breath.<p>

As far as Saturdays went, this one had proven to be very fine indeed. He'd had a particularly delicious cup of coffee that morning, one which he suspected Winky was responsible for. She had been assigned specifically to his care during the year after the war, and had formed an attachment to him that he couldn't seem to shake—not that he minded. He had enjoyed hundreds of very delicious meals during that year, and still called her to his quarters when he simply couldn't stomach the Great Hall. She knew exactly how particular he was about his coffee, and as soon as he got too comfortable with a certain blend, she went in search of a fresh one.

Moreover, it was a very fine Saturday. The windows were full of sunshine, and that was unusual in late September. He didn't mind sunlight at all. In fact, he suspected that a vast majority of the improvement in his colouring—for his skin no longer seemed so sallow, but rather, simply pale, even healthy, Salazar forbid—was due to sunlight. He had spent far too much of his life cramped in dungeons. His afternoon and evening walks around the grounds seemed to have rendered a great improvement in his overall health.

In addition to the coffee and the weather, there was something of a calm in his mind today. His curiosity had been, to some extent, sated the night before; his mind wasn't so quick to wander to Hermione Granger, and for that, he could only be thankful. He could sit and enjoy an old, massive tome containing an obscure history of the hybrid discipline of Potions and Defence Against the Dark Arts without interruptions from his restless mind.

Other interruptions, however, could not be avoided. Three sharp raps sounded at his door. He scowled, getting to his feet with reluctance. By the sound of the knocking, it could only be Minerva.

He tried to rearrange his features into forced neutrality, rather than glowering indignation, before opening his office door. It was indeed the Headmistress, though she didn't look inclined to stay.

"Good afternoon," he said, politely enough for having been disturbed from his peace.

She shuffled through the many scrolls she held and at last pulled a single missive from the bundle. "We've managed to nail down an exact schedule for night patrols," she said as he took the scroll of parchment from her. "So we'll all be able to plan accordingly. Oh, and if you see Hermione, will you pass this on?" She handed over another scroll. "She wasn't in her rooms or the library."

His eyes narrowed. "What gives you the absurd idea that I would see Professor Granger before you would?" he asked scornfully.

She gave him a stern look in response. "Honestly, Severus, can't you call her by her given name? And from what I understood, she actually paid you a social visit last night, of her own volition—which she hasn't done in my case!"

"It certainly wasn't social," he retaliated, though he could not, of course, speak about what the visit had actually entailed. "She wanted my opinion on a number of recent Potions publications—"

"It certainly _sounds _social," she murmured, her lips thin.

The corner of his lip lifted in a smirk. "Jealous, Minerva? Am I depriving you of your favourite student? If you want her back, I will throw her out with explicit directions to your office next time. Rest assured, I do not enjoy her nattering the way you do."

She fixed him with a beady stare before looking away. "No," she replied. "Honestly, I'm impressed that you could get her to talk at all. I asked her for a meeting this morning, and she was painfully closed-mouthed." She glanced at him once more before turning to walk away. "Be sure to review that," she added over her shoulder.

She had vanished around the corner before he had unfurled the first scroll, and what would he have said to her if she had remained? That pairing him with Granger for patrol duties—three nights a week—would give him a nearly constant headache? With a snarl of annoyance, he slammed his office door shut behind him and made his way to his sitting room.

He had just settled in his chair with a cup of tea and the book he'd been perusing previously when there was another knock.

"Fuck!" he growled under his breath.

He lurched to his feet and stalked through the bookcase and into his office, knowing full well who was at his door. He wrenched it open, preparing himself for a wave of annoyance at the sight of her.

It didn't come.

Granger looked exhausted. The shadows under her eyes had deepened since the night before. Her hair was less tame than usual, a little fluffier, the curls giving way to frizz. And her clothing left little to the imagination; she had certainly lost weight—more than was healthy—recently. Her jeans fit snugly enough, aided by a belt, but the deep blue blouse she wore was much too loose.

"I'm sorry to bother you—"

"You just missed Minerva." He held out the scroll to her, praying to Merlin that she would take the schedule and leave him in peace. "We have new patrolling schedules, and she seemed to think that I would be more adept at delivering yours than she would."

She cast him a bemused glance and tucked the scroll into her back pocket. "I assume she's paired us together, then?" she asked lightly.

He raised an eyebrow at her. "What would suggest such an assumption?"

Her smile was a little sad. "You're in a mood. I can only assume there must be a reason, and that my presence is the most likely of those reasons."

He sighed and opened his office door wider, allowing her room to come in. "Observant."

She hesitated on the threshold. "I suppose it could wait."

He suppressed a second sigh. "Why don't we identify 'it' before you draw more conclusions?"

She bit her lip. "The Potions storeroom...well, Slughorn left it in poor condition. You've been a Master for decades...I was just wondering if you might assist me with the re-organization of the place." Her expression was woefully hopeful. "I haven't had the privilege of dealing with such a large stock of ingredients before."

For a few seconds, he debated the issue, his book and cup of tea calling to him from his sitting room. Finally, though, he bit his tongue on a third sigh and followed her to the dungeons.

* * *

><p>There was a cauldron, softly simmering, on Granger's desk as they entered her office. "It's for Ginny," she commented, when she saw him cast it a lingering look. "She's pregnant again, and seems to be in considerable misery, compared to last time."<p>

"Ah." He smirked. "And which combination of the deceased will this one be named after?"

A look of unease passed over her features before it smoothed. "I don't think they've decided yet," she said lightly, turning to the storage room. "But it's a boy, so they have quite a few options."

About to berate her on the ease with which she revealed her own lies, he was distracted by the light throwing his former Potions storeroom into sharp relief. "_Poor condition_?" he growled. "_Poor _condition! It's reprehensible! What did the old codger do to it? We're going to have to take everything out…"

The boomslang skin was situated too close to the crocodile hearts; the ginger was stored across the room from the lemongrass; the hellebore, lacewing flies, and moonstone were stored too close the ground, not close enough, or too near the ceiling. It was an utter disaster. A feeling of horror was overcoming him. Granger shot him an apologetic look.

"Yes, I remembered it being very specifically organized while you held the post."

Distracted yet again, he turned to her, raising an eyebrow. "Yes," he said sardonically, "you would have a good memory of it, considering how often you stole from me."

Her cheeks flushed red; she lowered her eyes to the floor. The colour made her look moderately healthy again. "You don't know it was me," she contradicted.

"Ah, but your blush speaks volumes on your innocence. Not to mention, you ended up in the Hospital Wing half-converted to a cat, and I brewed half the potions used to restore you to your more typical form." He was smirking. "I have scarcely found anything so amusing."

She shot him a glare. "How was I to know it was cat hair?" she said balefully, turning back to her storeroom.

"If you didn't pluck it from the head of the individual themselves, you have cause for concern." He moved closer to a particular shelf, wincing at the improper jumble of ingredients there, and reached out with skilled hands to begin rearranging them. "What was the purpose of it, at any rate?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "We needed to turn into Slytherins, to see if Malfoy was Slytherin's heir."

He frowned, still carefully removing the stores of dismembered newts. "Pity it didn't work."

He could feel her glare, even if he wasn't looking at her. It was hot on the back of his neck. "Like hell it didn't! Harry and Ron got into the common room just fine without me."

At this, he had to turn to her, to see if she was lying through her teeth again, but she was clearly truthful; she radiated that sort of righteous indignation that Gryffindors did when their honesty was called into question. "You brewed a successful batch of Polyjuice Potion at the age of twelve?" he questioned, still suspicious.

"Thirteen," she corrected, "I'm older than Harry and Ron. My only mistake was getting the wrong hairs off Millicent Bulstrode's robes. I had no idea she had a cat."

He was going to laugh. There was no way around it. She seemed so utterly put-out by her mistake, utterly unaware of her success, that it couldn't be helped. He let out a hoarse chuckle, turning back to the supplies in an effort to contain his amusement, but it didn't work. He was still chortling under his breath as he removed the dismembered newts to a table in her classroom.

To his surprise, she wasn't giving him a look of shock, nor was she staring at him in terror. Soon after his soft chuckling began, she started laughing too, following him out of the storeroom with her arms full of a sack of porcupine quills.

"I suppose it was a stupid mistake," she murmured, as their laughter subsided.

Severus reached out to put a hand on her shoulder; the instant his fingers made contact with her, he wondered why he had done it. She felt frail beneath her blouse, and she was so much shorter than he. She had twisted her hair back in a bun to keep it out of the way for their work, but that only exaggerated how dark the shadows under her eyes were, how sharp her cheekbones were.

"You were thirteen," he reminded her. "A bit of cat hair is forgivable, considering you accomplished something nearly impossible for such a young witch."

Her cheeks turned a flattering shade of pink, now, indicating pleasure rather than embarrassment, but she didn't rush to thank him, merely looked up at him with eyes that seemed lighter than they had ten minutes previously. Brown, with a hint of golden; they sparkled with delight at the compliment. She seemed startlingly open, and he doubted he would have had difficulty accessing her thoughts at that moment, could only force himself not to take liberties with her absurd trust in him—

He took a step back to re-establish space between them; her perfume was dizzying, nearly intoxicating. He removed his hand from her shoulder and gestured back to the open door. "We need to take everything out," he told her, "before we can store it all properly again."

She nodded, still smiling slightly, and followed him back into the storeroom.

* * *

><p>They passed a pleasant afternoon. Hermione coaxed Snape into debate on a few recent Potions journals they'd both read, and conversation was animated, easy. Even the silences, as they were required to focus on the task at hand, were pleasant. He made off-hand comments about her hair, about her cat, about her friends, but none contained any real bite; in fact, she was beginning to suspect that his snark was more humour than insults.<p>

By the time they'd finished getting the place back in order, the clock was striking eight. "Damn," Snape muttered under his breath, flipping his hair back impatiently as he rearranged a few larger boxes under the shelves on the floor. "We've missed dinner."

She hesitated for a heartbeat, and then offered, "I could get Winky to bring us some, if you'd like. We could eat in my quarters."

He hesitated, too, but then his familiar smirk quirked his lips; she was also beginning to suspect that his smile _was _his smirk, that the two were inseparable from one another. "It _is _the least you could do, after dragging me into forced labour for the entirety of the day," he acknowledged.

Ignoring the barb, she raised her voice. "Winky!"

The elf appeared with a curtsy, immaculate in her tea-towel toga.

"Yes, Miss," she squeaked.

"Could we get some dinner, possibly? We missed the meal in the Great Hall."

"Certainly, Miss. Right away, Miss. And for Master Severus, too?" Winky asked, leaning around Hermione to look at Snape. Not just _look_; she was nearly beaming.

And he nodded back at her, appearing unsurprised by this pleasure at his presence. "Yes, Winky. And if you've got any of that coffee I had this morning…"

She was certainly beaming now. "Yes, certainly, Master Severus. Winky knew Sir would like that blend. Winky will remember in the future!"

She popped out of existence, presumably scrambling to prepare their dinner. Hermione winced. She still had difficulty with the idea of being served by enslaved beings, but they had better rights now, after the time she'd spent in the Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

There was a muffled curse behind her, and she turned to wander back into her office, where Snape was clearly attempting—and failing—to strip her wards. He let his wand fall to his side as she approached. "Are you expecting a war?" he asked in exasperation.

"I doubt you're any different," she retorted, lifting her wand to begin undoing the enchantments. Some were similar to those she'd used in their year on the run—her stomach twisted at the thought—but others were more complex, more evolved. After thirty seconds of gesturing and focusing, the wards came down, giving up the ghost with merely a shimmer in the air. "Old habits die hard," she added quietly, pulling out the book which would trigger the bookshelf to fold into the wall. The passage to her quarters opened, and she remembered with a pang that they had once been _his _quarters, full of _his _haunting memories, and that perhaps this wasn't such a good idea…

But he appeared indifferent, at the very least, so she thought it safe to lead the way. She had taken great liberties with these rooms—she had redecorated, re-organized, made it her own. It was not cramped; it gave the appearance of being open and airy, perhaps because she had charmed one entire wall to reflect a view of the grounds and the lake, as though from a great height. It appeared to be one enormous window, showing the reflection of the rising moon on the lake, the dark ripples of grass below.

The rest of the walls, of course, were home to her many books, all that she had ever owned; the bookcases didn't cover the walls entirely, however, and she had painted over the stone with a spell that looked like wallpaper. Broad vertical stripes canvassed the place, in alternating muted gold and forest green. She had spent too long in a crimson-red dormitory at Hogwarts, and had decided on something more neutral for her new quarters. The furniture was what she had scavenged or moved from her tiny flat; she had fixed it up, repaired it. It was all comfortable, but well-worn, obviously aged, and slightly mismatched.

She cast an anxious glance at Snape—there was every possibility that he would mock her for her choices of decoration—but he didn't seem inclined to criticize. Instead, he sank gratefully into the squashy sofa, rubbing his left knee almost absent-mindedly. Winky chose that moment to reappear, bearing two large platters and two cups of coffee, as well as a bottle of wine and two goblets.

"Here you are, Master Severus and Miss Hermione," she squeaked, adeptly laying out the food and drinks on the coffee table in front of Snape. "And Winky is bringing Miss the same coffee, but decaffeinated, Miss."

She could feel Snape's glance, but ignored him, opting instead to say, "Thank you, Winky."

With a curtsy and a beaming smile at Snape, Winky vanished.

"Decaffeinated?" Snape intoned as she, too, sank into the sofa beside him.

"Sensitive system. If I have caffeine after noon I'm up until the break of dawn." She didn't bother him with the rest—that it was already hard enough to sleep, anyway—and pulled her hair out of its bun with a sigh. The tightly-bound style had been giving her a headache.

Snape's eyebrows were just slightly furrowed as he pulled the lid off his platter of food; his free hand lightly massaged his knee. He caught her watching, and she turned to her own food immediately, blushing. She bit her tongue on the question she had been about to ask, knowing that he would not appreciate her nosiness.

"You are an open book," he said dryly, picking up his knife and fork.

She glanced at him. "So I've been told."

"It was a particularly well-placed curse," he said indifferently, as if answering her unspoken question. "The Dark Lord saw fit to torture me for several hours the night that he was reborn. I am lucky that Bellatrix was not yet free of Azkaban." The humour in his voice was chilling. "I doubt I would have survived. As it was, I walked away with some permanent nerve damage." The furrow between his eyebrows deepened as he spoke. "It acts up after a long day."

"I…" He looked at her when her voice shook; her eyes remained resolutely on her plate, not seeing the food at all. "I can't believe he sent you into that," she finished quietly.

"He had no choice. We needed a spy." The words were flat, lacking heat.

"That doesn't make it right."

"War does not allow us to choose between right and wrong. Our only choice must be to keep people alive. I would not have been a terrible loss, had I been discovered and killed."

"Don't say that," she whispered. The blood seemed to pound in her ears. She felt faint. The nightmare of earlier was dangerously close to overcoming her mind; it swam in her eyes, as though the scene could rematerialize before her.

He seemed to sense this—or, at the very least, perhaps she looked ill—and immediately poured out a goblet of wine, pushing it into her hand. "Drink," he ordered, and she took a shaky gulp. When he seemed sure that she was not going to faint, he continued. "My life, for the hundreds of innocent ones that were saved while I was able to pass information to the Order. It's simple Arithmancy."

She didn't speak again, contenting herself to let the alcohol do its work on her trembling muscles. His hand twitched, as though he might be about to reach out to her again, but seemed to think better of it. She remembered the heavy warmth of that hand on her shoulder and shuddered at the startling intimacy of it; it had seemed so simple a gesture, and yet, so meaningful for someone like Severus Snape to ever touch her...

"I'm not ungrateful," he finally murmured, his voice full of strain. "Death by giant pet snake has never appealed to me. I was merely stating facts."

She managed a shaky chuckle at the disgust in his voice. "It's not that," she said, feeling steadier now. "I never expected you to be grateful. After knowing…more of the whole story…I knew that you would hate me for making you live. It's just…it was selfish." She shrugged. "I was enough of a mess after the war. Harry and Ron could hardly be around me that first summer…it was like waiting for a perpetually broken faucet to spring yet another leak. If I hadn't…if you'd died anyway, when I was trying so hard to save you…it would have killed me. I would have felt like a failure. Because you deserved to live. I'm a sentimental Gryffindor at heart. And you did too much for us, even if it wasn't strictly for _us_, without any recognition at all. I set _fire _to you when I was twelve, for Merlin's sake!" she burst out furiously.

"Yes," he said idly. "I thought that might have been you."

Her eyes welling with tears, she stared down into her goblet, desperately trying to control herself.

"As I recall, I might have made a rather rude comment about your teeth," he remarked, still in a tone of boredom. "And insulted you for your desperation to prove that you did, indeed, know it all…a number of times." There was a pause as she took a soft breath, finally bringing her emotions under control, and then he continued. "I hardly endeared myself to you and your friends, Granger, and it was not wholly an act to fool the Dark Lord—it was, indeed, mostly just an old man's mean-spiritedness. I don't _blame _you for setting fire to me."

"You aren't _old_," she protested, now smiling weakly.

He raised his eyebrows. "I _feel _old," he said pointedly, his hand moving to his knee again as he finally started to eat.

The truth was, Hermione mused, he really wasn't. Wizards lived, on average, twice the number of years Muggles did; Snape was still in his prime. Now that she was his colleague, rather than his student, she could see that. Her father had started greying in his early forties, but Snape's hair was still black as night, no hint of silver at all, and he would be forty-six in January. Now that the pressures of life as a spy had been lifted from him, the premature lines in his face had smoothed. Removing himself from the dungeons seemed to have done him good, too; she could no longer call his skin tone _sallow_. He was merely pale. Despite the battle scars, despite the injuries—lasting or otherwise—he had collected over the years, she had seen the long muscles of his forearms, and suspected that the rest of him was just as lean. She felt her ears turning pink at the thought.

He cast an interested glance at the enormous window-wall. "A good investment," he commented. "The dungeons do terrible things to a person's complexion."

She smiled at the thought of him ever considering a person's complexion, and they subsided into snarky banter over the complexity of the charm used on the windows at the Ministry versus the simplicity of the one she had employed. By the time she showed him out, it was nearing eleven, and she was sorry to see him go.


	8. The Room

EIGHT

_The Room_

She was ill.

Severus was becoming uncomfortably aware of that fact.

He was accompanied by the orange beast during his Sunday afternoon walk; it prowled near him, occasionally breaking away to chase something or other, even sitting pointedly still when a particularly fat spider fell in their paths.

Eventually, he came to sit on a comfortable rock—his usual resting point, when he was halfway around the lake. It was smoothed out by years of use, but at this time of day, no one was about; the students knew that he took his walks at this time, and none wished to cross his path. He smirked at the thought, but as soon as the expression curled his lips, he thought of her.

A history of self-harm, sleeplessness, and anti-social tendencies. If it was anyone else, he would merely have thought it some passing concern. But it was not anyone. It was Hermione Granger, female third of the Golden Trio, war hero, and he was slowly becoming convinced that she was suffering from something worse than usual stress. He found her treatment of Minerva particularly puzzling. They had always been close, and Severus now witnessed for himself how she held her former Head of House at arm's length, responding only politely to inquiries at meals. Inane chatter was, apparently, only a part of her past now.

And she was seeking him out—socializing with him—when she didn't extend the courtesy to anyone else. They'd had a decent conversation the night and day before, he mused; her new finesse—her new brevity—with speech made her less infuriating than she'd ever been as a student, and she certainly put a limit on the facts she regurgitated. There was a reason, though, that she was trying to connect with him—only with him.

The girl was not stupid. He was sure that even if she didn't read the signs in herself, she saw them in him. Even if she couldn't put a name to what she was suffering, she knew enough about him to assume—or to guess—that he had endured the same. He massaged his temples, sneering to himself. Did she believe he had a cure—that he could offer her a way out?

The sneer faded within seconds. Anyone would want such a thing—some relief. He recognized the charm that clung to the bracelet Potter had given her; he had received something similar from the boy, a token to ease the body back into a natural sleep pattern. It had not worked half as well as his typical preparations did; Occlumency was usually a sure thing, a guarantee for six or seven hours of uninterrupted, dreamless sleep, unless he was careless. The charm was worthless. He was certain Granger had discovered as much, if the resilient circles under her eyes were any indication.

His stomach twisted with sympathy. He remembered well the nights plagued with nightmares, the hell of the brand on his arm, and after the war, the floodgates of his mind had simply unlocked to torment him anew. It had been a year—too long—before he had fully re-established his permanent walls and made peace with his memories. And he was still prone to fits of temper; he doubted that would ever fade. It just seemed a part of his disposition.

By the look of her, whatever rubbish she'd been using to fool her friends was failing her inside the castle. She had seemed well enough, that first night, that first week...he remembered clearly the light in those dark-scotch eyes as he entered the staffroom. Perhaps she had still been too thin, but he had been too furious with her very presence to notice.

He had to admit to himself that he was too interested in her to continue playing this game—the game of feigning disinterest, of attempting the same distance with her as with everyone else. It was a matter of health, he reasoned with himself. If she was, indeed, as ill as he suspected, then there could be no doubt about his course of action. She was his colleague, and despite the disconnection he felt with the lot of them, he did take it upon himself to keep a watchful eye on their health. She could be no different.

It would be difficult. He frowned as he stood. It would require every ounce of his Slytherin cunning to dig up all of her secrets, for he was sure there were many, and he was certain that she would have no interest in discussing some of them.

His eyes swept the grounds, and he spotted a familiar riot of brown curls near the gates, standing quite still. A flame of hair turned just outside the gates, and the crack of Apparition reached him across the lake.

Crookshanks pounced to his side, as though he knew it was time to put a plan into action.

* * *

><p>"Whatever possessed you to come here, Ron? What made you think I'd be at all pleased to see you?"<p>

Ron Weasley scrutinized her left shoulder. He hadn't looked her in the eye since his first glance at her as she strode forward to meet him at the gates. "Look," he muttered, "I'm sorry. I've apologized, a million times. Why can't we just leave it at that? I want you at the wedding."

Hermione let out a shrill laugh. It bordered on hysteria. "The problem is, Ron, that you never meant a _single _one of those apologies. I _loved you_, and as much as I don't care to admit it, you truly hurt me." Her eyes were tearing up now. "I knew it wasn't going to work out, in the end, but why couldn't you have done me the courtesy of just—of just saying, up front, that you didn't want to be with me?" She brushed the back of her wrist against her eyes, furious that her tear ducts were failing her now.

"You know, you always think you're right," he snapped. His discomfort seemed to have vanished; his blue eyes fastened on hers. "And that was always the damn problem, Hermione. Don't blame this mess on me! I tried to make it work, but I'm not stupid—you were keeping too many things from me for me to believe that you ever trusted me—I'm not blind—"

"Say it, then," she interrupted, her voice deadly. "What did you think I was keeping from you?"

He looked suddenly unsure, guarded, and when he stepped toward her, she couldn't back away; she felt frozen on the spot as his fingers gently caught her wrist, and he pulled up the sleeve of her shirt to bare the scar. He didn't touch it; perhaps he sensed how taut with tension she was, that she would snap if his fingertips even brushed the old wound.

"We've had our fair share of fights," he replied, his voice quiet again, even gentle. "We were always best friends, though, Hermione. I thought you could tell me anything; you certainly never had trouble speaking your mind before. You tried your hardest to hide this from everyone, and that, I would understand. But you hid it from me, too. And if you couldn't stand to show weakness with _me_…" He hesitated. "'Mione, I loved you." His voice was soft, full of regret. "I just knew that something was missing. Part of you—it was like you were gone. And it got worse and worse. You didn't talk to me anymore. You gave me these—these scathing glances—like I just couldn't understand. You never let me. You never let me _try_. Pansy…I never intended anything to happen with her. We bumped into one another at the Ministry and just got to talking. I was trying to get help to figure you out. She was a safe bet. I couldn't talk to Harry, to Ginny…I knew that you didn't want them to know. And then…" He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. "It was a mistake. It was a moment of passion. It was wrong. And sometimes I miss you like hell, but I can't regret it. We stopped being in love with one another, Hermione, and neither one of us knew how to end it. We were so busy trying to fix things that we couldn't even see the real problem."

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He shook his head and dropped a kiss on her forehead, his hand gentle on her hair, holding her in place for a brief second, before he pulled her sleeve down again, covering the scar.

"Ron—" she began, not knowing what to say, but trying desperately to think of something.

He put his finger to her lips. "Just think about it," he said quietly. "I want us to be friends again, Hermione, but you need to take time for yourself first. Figure it out. You always do."

With a last sad smile at her, he loped away, Disapparating just outside the gates.

* * *

><p>She was crying. It was the silent kind, broken by sharp gasps for air. She was a puddle on the ground, face buried in her hands, her hair wild around her, her slim body shuddering, soft whimpers escaping her now and then. In the time since Severus had started to approach her, she had gone from standing to kneeling to crumpled, legs folded beneath her in the grass. She gave no sign that she heard his footsteps, which were nearly silent, anyway.<p>

He half-expected the cat to reach her first and offer her comfort, but it vanished into the brambles in search of the mouse that had just skittered by. The rustling alerted her to her surroundings; she looked up, a sob stopped in her throat, and her eyes immediately fell to the ground again when she spotted him, standing barely a foot away, watching her. He held out a hand to help her up, but she avoided his gaze, getting to her feet on her own and pulling out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes.

"Hermione," he began with gentle tones. This had the opposite effect he had hoped; she cast him a startled, panicked look and made to brush past him. He reached out and fastened a hand around her elbow, preventing her from escaping. "Granger," he continued, his voice taking on its usual inflection now out of irritation.

She didn't look up at him. "If you've come to mock me, I really haven't the time, Snape," she snapped, her voice remarkably cold.

"What are your plans for the evening, then?" he returned, just as icily. "Take dinner in your rooms, avoid the staff, succumb to whatever new burden you've just been dealt by hiding from it?"

She glared up at him. "You're one to talk," she hissed. "Everyone feels so _badly_ for you, poor _Severus_, no one can reach him, he refuses to interact with his colleagues, he treats his students with indifference—"

"_Silence_."

Perhaps he was still capable of striking fear into her heart, for she ceased talking immediately, though the glare continued as she yanked her arm away from him.

"I merely wished to inquire after your well-being," he said simply, his voice painfully neutral, "as you wouldn't typically allow yourself to be found crying on the ground in the open. It struck me as suspicious."

She wiped furiously at her eyes again, as though the flow of tears was threatening to begin anew. "It's just...Ron," she muttered, not looking at him. "He just...he's..."

"Capable of deeper comprehension than you believed?" he suggested shrewdly. "Imagine that. The ginger menace with a brain."

She hiccuped, which might have been her attempt to stifle a chuckle, however weak. "I just want to be alone," she muttered, now folding her handkerchief into tiny squares. "I know I'm a mess, it's not that I don't appreciate your concern—"

"You'll eat with me, in my quarters. We have patrolling to do tonight, and it would no doubt calm your nerves to be away from the Great Hall."

She looked on the brink of refusing. In the end, however, she couldn't seem to find a way out of the offer; she conceded, and fell into step beside him as they made their way back to the castle.

* * *

><p>Dinner was a near-silent event. Aside from the crackling of the fire in the grate—and why anyone would have a fire lit in September was a mystery—they were quiet, not speaking. Hermione couldn't bring herself to attempt a conversation, and Snape clearly had no interest in starting one, either. In contrast to how pleasant the evening prior had been, this was a dismal affair. She also strongly suspected that he had dosed her tea with firewhiskey, which she couldn't be angry about; it seemed to be gradually calming her nerves, at the very least.<p>

At half past eight, he abruptly got to his feet and motioned for her to follow. Confused, she rose too, only to discover him sitting fluidly on the floor. When a few seconds had passed and she still stood, he glanced up at her idly, his black eyes curiously blank, and motioned for her to sit across from him. "Trust me," he said, his voice idle, almost careless.

Uneasy now, she sank to the floor, mimicking his cross-legged posture.

"I doubt we'll encounter anything particularly dangerous tonight, but as we do have to at least scan the forest, I'd feel more at ease with you at full strength," he said, as though feeling her general anxiety and curiosity and giving out an explanation for why he was putting her through it. "Close your eyes."

She did as instructed, the strange expression on his face pressed into the black of her eyelids: blank, at ease, and yet somehow curious, intrigued.

"Imagine a room," he murmured. "A room that holds all your secrets, your thoughts, your fears, your anxieties. The things that distract you from doing your job."

If this was an insult, he did a good job of masking it; she didn't feel nearly insulted enough.

"Everything that distracts you," he repeated.

She nearly jumped at the closer proximity of his voice, and at least twitched in reaction to his hand lifting hers away from her knee. He pressed her palm against his, fingers still outstretched. His closeness struck a nerve; she nearly shuddered away. It felt strange, too intimate, uncomfortable to be in such proximity to the brooding man.

Abruptly, his fingers laced with hers, and the vision of the room poured into her. _Everything_, he told her, standing at her side in the doorway. It was empty, panelled in oak, dim, dusty. There were no windows.

_That would defeat the purpose,_ he murmured, turning away from the room and looking out into the hallway. _We can put all this away, then._

She turned to follow his gaze, still puzzled by the oddly disconnected remembrance of his palm against hers, and instantly shuddered. There were boxes piled to the ceiling in the corridor, which was open and airy compared to the room. They were labelled, sometimes with many words—Snape moved aside a box labelled _why must Minerva be such an interfering harpy_ with what she suspected was a stifled snort—and sometimes few, such as simply _Ron _or _Harry _or _Ginny_. Then there were boxes upon boxes with broad, ominous black lettering: _WAR_.

She stood paralysed, staring at all of her anxieties, with no clue how to begin.

His hand squeezed her shoulder, long fingers settling against her collarbone. _Pick them up, put them in the room. It's a rudimentary exercise, and it won't last, but it will hold for the next few hours if you're strong enough._ His voice became sharp. _And don't look inside any of them._

Before she could open her mouth to ask why, he answered, _It will be a long time before you are that strong._

His hand, while unfamiliar in this gesture of comfort on her shoulder, felt familiar in its place there, as if they had stood here a thousand times before. The simple magic of the place gathered around him with warmth and it seemed to spread to her as long as they were connected. She took an inordinate amount of comfort from it.

His hand pulled away from her. _You must do it yourself, _he told her, carelessness back in his voice, detachment in his face.

She stooped to the nearest box and lifted it, not bothering to see what it was, and trucked it over to the room.

It was slow-going. The boxes were heavy, and though she was certain she had no muscles in this inner sanctum of her mind, they fatigued as if they did exist. She slowed with every crate of anxiety, struggling under the effort, while he stood aside and watched her pass back and forth. His black eyes tracked her every movement, muscles tight with tension every time she paused for even a second.

The last box barely fit in the room; it was shoved and pushed against the others, which towered to the ceiling. She stood back, breathing hard, and wiped her hair off her sweaty forehead.

_Close the door_, Snape instructed.

She did so; the bolt barely clicked as the last box resisted confinement.

_Imagine a key_.

She did—a key similar to the one she, Harry, and Ron had stuffed into the door of a charmed room so long ago—and it appeared. Without waiting for his instruction, she put the key in the lock and turned.

Instantly, she was back in her real body, which was only sore from sitting in such a position for so long. His hand was warm around hers, their bodies leaned toward each other as though conspiring together. The peace that seeped through her was unbelievable. She was at ease, lacking tension for the first time in weeks, utterly relaxed and focused, and all the things that had formed the tormenting voices in her head were tucked away in cell-sized boxes in a nucleus-sized room, and she couldn't hear them.

She could barely even feel them.

* * *

><p>She sat with her back perfectly straight, but her shoulders were relaxed. Severus could visibly see the evidence of the magic taking hold and felt himself relax reflexively. It was impossible to find any inner sanctum near her any more under typical circumstances, and this would only last a short while.<p>

"Hermione," he prompted her.

Her eyes opened instantly, clear and amber, bloodshot gone; even the dark circles beneath them had lessened.

"We ought to leave in fifteen minutes," he reminded her. "Would you like some tea?"

Her eyes flicked to the clock and then back to his face. "Yes," she answered politely. "That would be nice."

He rose and offered her a hand to help her up; she took it without question and rose fluidly before moving to sit on the couch. "It seemed like hours, didn't it, while we were there," she commented, watching him prepare the tea.

"Your sense of time was distorted; it takes practice," he told her.

She sipped her tea, her brow furrowed. "It's very disconcerting," she confided.

He merely looked at her, his features blank, his thoughts full of the boxes in that corridor. _It ought to be, with all that just sitting in there growing mould and all sorts of monsters_, he thought with no small dose of bitterness. Aloud, he said, "You've been carrying unnecessary baggage; it ought to feel quite strange."

"Yes," she murmured, "quite strange." For a moment, she stared into her tea, then glanced up at him. "Where did you learn to do that?"

_I reduce her to her most basic form, and she's still got to get a question out in the first five minutes_. "In a book," he said lightly, voice full of sarcasm.

Unexpectedly, she laughed. "Of course," she answered. "What a silly question."

He had heard her laugh before, of course, but it had been nothing like this: carefree, easy, with no errant emotion marring the moments of her consciousness. She reminded him of...

_No_. _She's nothing like her_.

"What's wrong?"

Her eyes watched his face closely, pure concern in her features, and he felt anxiety, real anxiety, touch him for the first time. He had not expected Hermione Granger to be terribly different in her unburdened form, perhaps because he had not been, but he had assumed wrongly that all witches and wizards were created equal. She was pure truth now, genuine, and to see that concern for him all over her face meant that she felt it all the time, and he had never guessed that she was at all interested in his well-being.

"Nothing," he answered her smoothly. "Nothing you should worry about. You'll ruin the whole exercise."

Her features relaxed. "I wouldn't. You put an awful lot of effort into it." Her eyes softened. "Thank you."

They were the two most heartfelt words he had ever heard uttered in his direction—positive ones, at least—and he wouldn't be able to abide the feeling of it much longer.

"Come," he said curtly, not acknowledging her gratitude. "We must patrol."

As she drifted past him on her way out the door, wand at the ready, unease slowly filled him. It would be a night on tenterhooks, he was certain of it, all because he had been so determined to clear her mind...to help her.

He cursed his own foolishness as he followed her out.


	9. Tactless

NINE

_Tactless_

The shadows of Hogwarts were deep and dark; Hermione had forgotten. It had been a long while since she had walked the grounds at night, and she had not missed it. She hurried to keep up with Severus's long, even strides. For a man who had suffered permanent nerve damage, he still moved abominably quickly. She could distinctly feel the tension radiating from him, the same as it had been during the past hour and a half while they patrolled the castle. His wand was clutched tightly in his hand, black eyes sweeping the grounds furiously as they approached the greenhouses.

She, on the other hand—though she certainly didn't enjoy being out in the open dark—felt relatively relaxed. She was on the alert, that was certain—she doubted she had ever been so attuned to her surroundings—but the anxiety of earlier in the day was distinctly absent. For a moment, she worried that by working the magic to ease that anxiety, Severus had taken some part of it upon himself.

_Don't be silly. Your tension is all locked away in little boxes in a tiny little room. He couldn't get at it if he tried._

Regardless, his agitation was evident and bothersome. Perhaps once they were inside the greenhouse and not so exposed, he would relax. She followed him in and let the door snap shut behind her, their wands illuminating the variety of relatively-tame plants. As he stalked down one long row, she decided to say something.

"Are you always so anxious when you're patrolling?" she asked lightly. "You'd think we were surrounded by Death Eaters, the way you're behaving."

He shot her a look—half-annoyance, half-curiosity—and then turned away. "I'd be remarkably more relaxed if we were surrounded by Death Eaters," he said darkly, casting his light over the further corners of the greenhouse.

"That's cheerful. Shall I fetch some for you?" She aimed her wand at the other end of the building. A few plants pulsated in the light, but there was no other movement. "They might be hard to come by..."

He was looking at her with a hint of bemusement now, arms folded across his chest, a frown covering his features. His black eyes seemed more open than usual; she could detect some feeling in them rather than the typical cool detachment. There was a glint of concern in his gaze, and her cheeks immediately burned at the thought of Severus Snape worrying about _her_. Surely she was imagining things. She looked away from him.

He didn't comment on her embarrassment, though she had no doubt that he had noticed it; he merely opened the door to the greenhouse. She followed him out.

The next fifteen minutes passed in silence as they journeyed through each of the greenhouses in turn. Her thoughts wandered, again, to the man nearby. They would be doing this often, three nights a week, and she wondered if he would always be so tightly wound. It would undoubtedly grate on her nerves at some point. She was only set to patrol with him; she wondered if it would get tiresome, or if it was more likely that he would cast a silencing spell on her at some point to make it bearable.

Three nights a week. _I'll drive him mad_, she thought ruefully, then paused, frowning. Funny—didn't the other professors change partners at least once throughout the week? She was sure she had glimpsed that on the schedule. Why would only they be paired together, alone, every time they were scheduled?

"Merlin's pants," she muttered suddenly aloud.

Severus glanced up from his inspection of the Venomous Tentacula, keeping his wand trained on it; it seemed discouraged from taking a bite out of him. "Yes?" he said curtly.

"Why is it Minerva's paired us together for patrols three nights a week, when the other professors all change partners at least once?" she demanded, still frowning. "I saw it on the schedule. We're the only two who always patrol together."

"I expect it's her idea of a joke," he said dryly. "Or some form of terribly clever torture."

Typically, Hermione would have felt a bit hurt by this insinuation, but at the moment, she was too perplexed by the puzzle being presented to her. "No. That can't be it. She doesn't know _how _to joke. And she would never try to torture you."

His derisive snort made it clear enough that he didn't believe this one bit.

"She's setting us up," Hermione declared.

She had his attention now; his head snapped up from his deeper study of the Venomous Tentacula. It took his moment of being caught unawares to wrap a long tentacle around his wrist, which he viciously slashed away with a jab of his wand. The plant trembled.

"I beg your pardon?" he growled.

He had clearly misinterpreted her statement. She couldn't stifle her laughter; his face was utterly terrifying. She suspected he was hiding indignation.

"Not like that," she got out through her last chuckles. "Merlin, no. But don't you see? We're easily the two most anti-social professors on staff. Either she's trying to save the rest of the staff from us, or she expects that we'll become bosom friends as a result of being stuck together." She paused thoughtfully, then added, "I suspect Dumbledore's portrait to be involved, as well."

His mouth had thinned to a narrow line. He threw open the greenhouse door, gesturing for her to go ahead.

"I have a point," she insisted as he followed her out, resetting the wards behind him. "You know I do."

"What of it?" he said dismissively. "It's nothing I haven't suspected myself from the moment she handed over both our schedules and demanded that I pass yours on." His jaw tightened. "I also rather doubt that she expects us to become bosom friends. I daresay she hopes or dreams, but does not expect. She's not a fool."

Her features turned rather crestfallen; she allowed her gaze to fall from his face to the grass, where her wandlight danced over the sea of green as they walked. It flickered a bit in the wake of the disappointment seeping through her.

"Oh," she said, her voice rather small. "Yes, I suppose you're right." She forced herself to chuckle. Surely she was usually much more convincing than this when it came to hiding her emotions?

Something inside of her let go, and for a second, she faltered; she stumbled on the uneven surface of grass and would have fallen, had his hands not caught around her upper arms and held her in place as she felt the magic of the room they had created go out of her. She shook as the awareness of all her cares and worries filled her up again, for a moment utterly overwhelming as they all took hold of her at once, and then—

It was dark. Her eyes were tightly closed. She was breathing the scent of something sharp—something like pine. His long fingers were still wrapped around her upper arms, holding her gently upright.

"Granger," he said, with no unusual intonation in his voice at all, mere cool detachment decorating his tone.

She opened her eyes, and for a moment, allowed herself to stare straight into the black of his. Whatever concern she had thought she had seen was gone; there was just cold, cruel emptiness, and the humiliation of having imagined something there, no matter how small.

She jerked herself free of his hands and yanked her cloak straight. "I don't ever want to do that again," she said in a low, tight voice. "And if you really think that I can't patrol in my state of mind, you're welcome to do it alone."

With that, she turned on her heel and marched away from him, dearly hoping that he would get himself eaten by something savage in the Forbidden Forest.

* * *

><p>Severus had watched her go, long enough to see that she made it safely into the castle, before embarking on his usual inspection of the Forbidden Forest. He had thought incessantly of her—of the disappointment and hurt and anger in her eyes and the absolute fury in her voice—all the while, and he was still thinking of her, an hour later, as he drew a bath and tried to shake away the annoyance he felt for the little chit.<p>

He sank into the hot water, kneading at the pain in his knee, wishing he could rub as efficiently at the pain in his head.

It had been a disturbing thing to see the effects of the magic wear off so abruptly. It had been even more disturbing to see her sudden change in disposition; from downcast and disappointed—emotions so strong that her magic had nearly failed to function—to confusion, to anger. Powerful anger, infused with pain.

_Slytherin cunning, indeed_, he thought, with a good deal of self-deprecation. _Implying the foolishness of a potential friendship with her was certainly enough to eradicate any trust she had in you._

He had been driven to distraction by the way she behaved when in her meditative state; he had been consumed with being on guard, being wary of how she might act or what she might say—so wary, that he gave no thought to what exited his own mouth, relying on the script of his sarcasm to ring reasonably true. This was an error of judgement that would have gotten him killed a decade ago; it was humiliating to think that Hermione Granger had been the cause of the slip. That something as simple as her honesty, her concern, had put him off-balance.

He closed his eyes. Bridging the gap he had now created would take some effort. He grimaced at the thought. It would more than likely involve an apology, something he had not given with any degree of sincerity in years. A note would be best. Undoubtedly, the infernal beast she called a cat would deliver it to her, if it was anywhere to be found in the next few days.

Or, he mused, he could return to attempting to ignore her. She would, undoubtedly, gladly do the same, now that he had offended her. She would steer clear of him, and he would be left in peace, without the female third of the Golden Trio to torment him into giving her Occlumency lessons and practise duelling. It would be as if the last few days—indeed, the last few weeks—had never happened; it would be merely a small battle to keep his solitude and his distance, a battle he had won.

The memory of the anxieties she held fast to rose, unbidden, in his thoughts. Endless crates labelled _WAR _in those stark, bold letters. Piles upon piles of boxes scrawled on with names. Most astonishing, a corner devoted to him; a whole bundle of crates labelled simply _Severus_.

Not _Snape_, but _Severus_.

Was that what she called him in the sanctuary of her own head? While he still grimaced under the burden of trying to help her, of enduring her mere presence, had she formed some attachment to him—some attachment that he had just as swiftly beaten back, when she was clearly lacking in small comforts?

_Severus_. In her neat, elegant handwriting, etched on those boxes, he had seen it and carefully masked his interest—his shock.

He didn't always simply _endure_ her presence. The Saturday they had passed together while organizing the potions storeroom had been tolerable enough. He had stayed, past the work, past the food, merely arguing with her for hours, and he hadn't loathed the experience. If he forced himself to examine the truth of the matter, it had been...pleasant. She was a clever, adept conversationalist, her knowledge expansive, her opinions typically sound. He had not endured those hours. He had not been tormented. He had _enjoyed _her.

And she still compelled his curiosity to a painful degree.

With a growl of irritation, he let his head fall back against the lip of the tub. "Fuck."

His apology would have to be quite sincere, he suspected.

* * *

><p>Severus had been right in thinking that Granger—Hermione; he really ought to get used to calling her that—would do everything in her power to ignore him. He purposely chose a seat nearer to her usual one at the High Table the next morning, and she just as purposely sat on the opposite side of the Headmistress, tugging Longbottom down beside her before he passed her by and accidentally sat himself next to the Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor.<p>

_No matter_, he thought grimly as he sipped at his coffee. _She can ignore me all she likes, but she won't ignore an apology. She's still a Gryffindor._

He sat down to write it that very evening, already frustrated by her dramatic avoidance of him throughout the day. Three times, she had spotted him in a corridor—twice full of students, once utterly empty—and each time she immediately turned and strode purposefully away. Her half-Kneazle was nowhere to be found, and he suspected that the cat may not be as warm to him in the future either. He would have to deliver the letter himself, and loathed the idea of accidentally happening across her as he tried to slide it under her door.

An hour and many crumpled pieces of parchment later, he rolled the missive into a scroll. For a moment, he thought again of how she had looked at breakfast. The shadows under her eyes were even deeper. He suspected that the backlash of the magic they had performed to clear her mind had been particularly potent. After a moment's hesitation, he poured a vial of Dreamless Sleep from his personal stores and enclosed it within the scroll before sealing it.

The night had grown late. It was past curfew, and no students were about, but as he entered the corridor where her rooms were located, a near-silent humming unsettled him. The buzzing sound, grating against the silence of the dungeons, grew louder the closer he got to her door. It settled at a low but irritating hum as he stood outside, listening to nothing but static.

Well, he wasn't the creator of _Muffliato_ for nothing. With barely a flick of his wand, the charm was dismantled, and he listened more closely at her office door.

There were quiet whimpers and little gasps for breath and the sound of shuffling. Something roughly scraped against the floor. "Sorry, Crooks," he heard her murmur, her voice punctuated by a hiccup and clearly stuffy, as though she was suffering from a head cold. "I should go to sleep, shouldn't I? I'm not accomplishing anything here."

The cat's soft meow came through the door.

"I'm fine, you great git," she mumbled.

But then there was a thump, as though her knees were hitting the ground. She sniffed, and then, as though she had barely held it in until that moment, she was crying, her distress filling his ears with muffled clarity, wrenching his heart in his chest as though he still had one.

"I'm just a stupid, silly girl," she choked out through her tears, as the meowing and purring increased tenfold—the cat trying to comfort her. "Of course he's never wanted anything to do with me. Minerva should have known better than to even try, if that's what she was doing." She was weeping harder now. "Oh, Crooks. I just thought he could help me. I thought, fighting again...Occlumency...I thought...I c-can't _stand _this. I j-just can't. I'm so t-tired..." Her voice stuttered, and she gave up trying to explain her distress to the cat; her sobs overtook her.

He drew back from the door and looked at the scroll of feeble words in his hands, unable to listen for another moment. He leaned down, pushed it under the door, and set off, the sound of her crying still ringing in his ears, try as he might to scrub it from his memory.

* * *

><p>After a long few moments of sobbing into her cat's fur, Hermione felt Crookshanks gently twist out of her embrace. She pulled her knees up to her chest instead, curled up tightly as the tears squeezed from beneath her eyelids and streamed down her face, and she felt as if a last chance had been snatched from her, as if her life was ending, now, because she simply couldn't pick herself up from the memories that assaulted her so thoroughly.<p>

Bellatrix Lestrange, carving words into her flesh.

Fred Weasley, dead on the stone floor of the castle.

Colin Creevey, carried into the Great Hall by Neville Longbottom, his body tiny in death.

Ron, telling her that a part of her was gone.

Severus Snape, cold in the dust of the Shrieking Shack.

Severus Snape, sharing a Saturday of relative warmth and cheerfulness with her.

The memories put knives through her chest; the thoughts turned her insides inside-out. _What is it that I thought I had? _she asked herself miserably. _That a few conversations, a few insights to my soul, had won me a friend in him? How could I be so foolish?_

Crookshanks meowed at her side, gently pushing his face against her thigh.

She struggled to put a lid on the memories and control her sobs; when she looked up, all she could see was a mangled orange blob. She brushed her hand across her eyes, trying to clear her vision, and refocused. Her cat was nosing a scroll toward her, sealed in dark green wax and a crest she didn't recognize. Sniffing, she picked it up and broke the scroll open, unfurling it with shaky hands to read the contents. A vial of purple liquid rolled out from the centre of the scroll and hit the stone floor, but didn't break.

_Hermione,_

_It is now clear to myself and the entire staff (and perhaps a few more-observant students, as well) that you are quite angry with me. I can only surmise that this is due entirely to lack of tact on my part, and some small misunderstanding on yours._

_I take some offence at Minerva's schemes to insert you into my life, not because of who you are, but because of the implicit interference you represent. I apologize if I did not make this distinction terribly clear._

_The aftermath of the exercise we performed on Sunday night often increases insomniac tendencies for a few days. Therefore, I've enclosed a vial of Dreamless Sleep, which I would strongly suggest drinking._

_You will, of course, patrol with me on Tuesday evening, for I have never known you to shirk your duties._

_If you still desire them, I will continue to offer you Occlumency lessons on Friday evenings._

_Severus_

For a moment, she wasn't certain if she was going to continue crying or begin to laugh. Some combination of both burst from her lips, a laugh that was strangled by a sob.

Of course, the ex-Death Eater, ex-Slytherin would not face her to apologize.

The cool voice of reason answered her. _The ex-Death Eater, ex-Slytherin wouldn't apologize to you at all if he didn't mean it_.

With a last sniff, she traced the letters of her name, the first name he had yet to call her unless he had just been asked to. _Hermione_. Her fingers moved down the parchment, seeking out the spiky lettering of his name. _Severus_. An uneasy peace stole through her. If the message itself was not terribly apologetic, the way he had written it was. He had deliberately implied that he expected to see her interact cordially with him soon, had even unnecessarily reminded her of Occlumency and his willing participation in her lessons...

"Perhaps I'm just over-thinking it," she said aloud, while Crookshanks sniffed at the parchment.

But he had addressed it to _Hermione_, not _Miss Granger _or _Professor Granger _or even _H.G.—_just _Hermione_. Something so simple and yet so casual that could not be ignored when it came to a man as complex as Severus Snape.

She let a hand fall into Crookshanks's fur. "What do you think of him, Crooks?"

Her cat meowed happily, and her cat had never led her astray before.

She gathered up Crookshanks in her arms—out of love of food and a place to sleep, she was sure, he acquiesced—and tucked the scroll and vial into the waistband of her skirt, deciding that she would clean up the smashed ink bottle and scattered parchment in the morning. For the moment, she could do with a good night's sleep.

After brushing her teeth and changing into her nightclothes, she settled into bed, looking at the scroll and vial on her bedside table. The Dreamless Sleep clung to the glass within. She had long resisted the desire to buy or brew some of the potion for herself. It was not a fix to the problem, merely a temporary solution, one that could make her dependent on something synthetic to sleep.

And then, there was always the possibility that Severus had poisoned it. She snorted at that absurd thought; it was far too obvious a murder for him to conduct. Still, she uncorked the vial and sniffed to be sure. Nothing out of the ordinary. And the dreams and sleeplessness _had _been worse the night before.

_Just one night couldn't hurt, _she thought, and drank down the vial. _It's not as if I've had any luck with that permanent fix._

Relaxation stole over her, and for once, she slipped effortlessly into sleep.


	10. Plans and Peace

TEN

_Plans and Peace_

Severus Snape did not have a heart.

That is to say, he had long suspected that his only remaining emotions were anger, irritation, some degree of self-righteousness, loathing, perpetual guilt, and the vast moments of neutrality where none of the above were evident. Others might have called it peace, but to him, the time was simply empty, devoid of feeling, and he suspected that peace was generally more pleasant than that.

It had been a long time, in other words, since something new had changed him, hurt him, or touched him at all. It was an appalling feeling.

He wanted to scrub the sound of her crying straight out of his head with a wire brush, if that was what it took. He paced incessantly in front of the fire while the sound of it filled his ears with increasing volume. More than once, he had to strangle the desire to throw something. The clock ticked later and later into the night, and he fought the urge to return to her dungeon rooms, to listen, to knock, to see if anything had changed since he had bolted from her office like a coward.

_Coward, _Potter's voice echoed through his head. _Fight back, you cowardly—_

The glass of scotch he was holding did break, then, as he truly considered that when it came to Hermione Granger, he was a coward. The glass sliced into his skin and the alcohol burned into the wounds and he stood still, thinking of her eyes as she searched his face for any hint of feeling, and finding none there...

He strongly suspected that he had never before held the power to injure someone so thoroughly; at least, he hadn't held that power in over thirty years. For good reason, he reminded himself bitterly. He couldn't be trusted with people. No part of them—no bit of their soul or their mind—was safe from him. They couldn't give him a single bit of themselves that he wouldn't twist and warp and destroy beyond recognition before their very eyes.

_I just thought he could help me._

Help her? Certainly, if he didn't crush what was left of her first.

_I'm just so t-tired..._

The crying—_her _crying—grated against his mind.

Fighting nauseating guilt and anger and consumed by the thought of her—_is she still crying? Did she refuse the potion? Is the damn cat smart enough to find help if she needs it?—_he threw open the door to the cabinet where he kept Dumbledore's Pensieve. Lifting a shaking wand to his temple, he forced the power of his focus upon the memory and dragged it from the vice of his mind, dropping it into the material that already swirled within. Blood, too, fell from his hand, and he conjured a small length of linen to keep the worst of the damage at bay for the moment.

One after another, he found his most recent memories of her and poured them out into the stone basin. All the way back to the day she had woken him to his second life, eyes huge in her too-thin face, crying over the thought of him joining the ranks of the dead. He searched deeper, into her seventh year, where he had avoided contact with her as much as possible. And then further, reaching now, for memories of her as she had been in her teenage years: vivacious and bushy-haired, she shrank smaller and smaller until she was the Girl-Who-Wouldn't-Shut-Up.

He stared down into the swimming copies of his memories, and then, slightly calmer, began to search out two particular volumes in a nearby bookshelf. He spotted the plain lettering on the spines almost instantly: the books stood out because there was nothing magical at all about them. They were not bound in leather or written on parchment.

_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_, the cover of one read. _Fourth Edition, Text Revision._

_The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, _the other was labelled. _Clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines._

He scanned through the first volume, searching for the page that he had long-since marked. On 463, he found the familiar heading. _Posttraumatic stress disorder._

_DSM-IV-TR_ and _ICD-10_ agreed with some simple criteria: symptoms, such as re-experiencing the original trauma, insomniac tendencies, and general hyper-vigilance had to last longer than one month and cause significant disruption of the patient's social or occupational tendencies.

He ran a rough calculation. It had been over seven years since the Battle of Hogwarts. He stared down at the manuals, the anger going abruptly out of him while the guilt lingered quietly in the back of his mind.

She had been suffering ever since.

Seven years undiagnosed, because neither she nor her family and friends had thought to more closely examine her symptoms. Because the Wizarding world had experienced so little of mental illness that they had patched up her magic and her wounds and sent her onward, as though she would forget the horrific year she had experienced while running for her life and trying to bring down a much more powerful, much more clever wizard than herself...

He glanced toward the Pensieve full of copied memories and tucked it back in its cabinet. Tomorrow, he would start digging through his scant memories of her. He would begin learning how deep the damage went through his examination of her words and actions. He would commit himself to helping her, or let it be known, if only to himself, that Severus Snape had learned nothing from his past mistakes.

She was entirely wrong to want for his guidance, but at the risk of taking another life with his cowardice, he wouldn't turn her away.

* * *

><p>Hermione was running late. One of her third-years had somehow gotten frog brains splattered all over the east wall of her dungeon classroom, and by the time she had gotten Filch to start in on cleaning up the mess, dinner had already started.<p>

She entered the Great Hall quietly and paused just inside the staff door, surveying her seating options with some amusement and slight dread. There was exactly one remaining seat, and it happened to be to the left of Severus, who sat at the very end of the table. Neville, spotting her, shot her an apologetic look before turning back to his conversation with Sprout and Flitwick, who appeared to have taken Hermione's usual seat. She stifled a sigh. She would rather have postponed their next interaction until it came time to patrol that night, but there was nothing to do about it now.

She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and pulled out the chair beside him, keeping her eyes on her food. Apology or no, she was in no mood to force polite conversation with this man.

"Frog brains," his deep voice mused from beside her. "Filch will never forgive you."

Startled, she glanced up, a bit of mashed potato falling between the serving platter and her plate. He was looking at her with dark humour in his eyes, as though she had said something that amused him. Either he was the best actor she had ever met—and considering the many years he had spent as a double agent, she was not ruling out that possibility—or his apology truly had been heartfelt.

"I doubt that Filch was ever particularly endeared to me," she returned lightly, recovering.

"No, I suppose he wasn't."

Unable to hold his black gaze any longer—no matter how unusually friendly he might be acting—her eyes dropped back to the table. She busied herself with assembling a plate of food, ever aware of the dark presence sitting at her side.

"Tell me," he said abruptly, as she began eating her pork chop, "how is Miss Quirke with Potions?"

She glanced up, automatically searching out the student he had named. She was surprised to see the girl at the Gryffindor table, sitting a bit apart from a group of laughing boys. If she remembered correctly, Annabel Quirke was a fourth-year.

"One of the best," she answered, recalling the girl's last essay. "More talent than many of the lot put together." She turned to look at him; his black eyes were still on the girl, brow furrowed. "Why do you ask?"

"She is...particularly talented...in Defence as well." He shook his head. "Her placement in Gryffindor is regrettable."

Hermione frowned. "Why? Because you can't be seen favouring a Gryffindor?"

Her indignation lasted until he snorted. "Not in the least." He paused to drink deeply from his goblet before leaning back in his seat. "Look at her," he said, so she looked. The girl's head was bent over a book as she ate, half-heartedly, clearly uninterested in the food on her plate or the company around her. "Rather than surrounding her with kindred souls, the Sorting Hat dropped her in the lion's den and told her to make due with it."

"You don't know that," she protested. "Perhaps she chose to be put there."

He turned his deeply amused gaze on her. "Is that how you came to be a Gryffindor? Because you asked?"

"It was a choice," she said bracingly. "The Sorting Hat would've put me in Ravenclaw, but I'd already read all about Dumbledore and famous Gryffindors, and that was where I wanted to be. So I was."

"Can you tell me sincerely that you were better off?" he questioned. "Ravenclaw would have suited you better. Or perhaps—"

"Don't you dare tell me I belonged in Slytherin," she said darkly. "I'll set my cat on you."

He raised one dark eyebrow. "Still prone to the prejudices of your house, are you?"

"I'm Muggle-born," she pointed out, "and therefore disqualified. I would have been eaten alive."

"I doubt it," he answered. "There are plenty of half-bloods in Slytherin. The most powerful of them all were not pureblood. You would merely have had to lie, like so many others did."

"Do they still?"

His brow furrowed. "I know relatively little of their house politics now—perhaps because there is not much to know. They are quiet, confused. They feel guilt and estrangement. They are more separated from the rest of the school now than they have ever been."

"That's terrible," she murmured, before she could stop herself. When he looked at her, as though expecting her to continue, she muttered, "I meant that it's a shame."

"I was never under the impression that you thought terribly highly of them."

She looked out on the Great Hall and noticed the things that he'd mentioned. While the Slytherins had once been as talkative as the Gryffindor table, they now seemed subdued, their conversations taking place in undertones.

"I was raised with the era of Slytherins who had inherited their prejudices from their families," she answered finally. "Draco Malfoy called me a Mudblood when I was just a second-year and frequently tried to get me and my friends expelled on the rare occasions when we were undeserving of that punishment." She thought she saw him smirk out of the corner of her eye. "They took things too far. I have no doubt that Slytherin house could be as prestigious, as powerful, as worthy as any other, if a new generation makes better choices."

"We did not always have a choice," he commented.

She could sense his strain to keep his tone conversational. "There's always a choice," she returned.

He dipped his head. "I would be inclined to disagree." His voice was still light, even polite, but he pushed back his seat and got to his feet. "I shall meet you outside your office to patrol tonight. We'll start in the dungeons."

She stared after him long after he had vanished, black robes billowing, before her eyes returned to her plate and she realized she'd hardly taken a single bite.

"Severus does have that effect on the appetite, my dear," Madam Hooch, sitting to her other side, told her as she picked up her fork again.

"No...it wasn't...I just got caught up in the conversation, is all." She scooped up a forkful of mashed potatoes, which had now grown slightly cold, while Hooch shook her head in disbelief and examined the dessert options.

His words echoed in her head. _We did not always have a choice._ She realized what little she actually knew of Severus Snape. While her best friend still kept certain pertinent memories in hiding, she had seen nothing of them herself and had only heard second-hand about a few of them. The many books that had been released on the history of the war mentioned him, surely, and his role in the conflict, but always skated over whatever personal life he might have had, drawing little attention to what had motivated him to switch sides.

She knew that much, but she was certain it hardly brushed the surface. Love for one woman had carried him so far, but she wondered what carried him now.

By the time she finished dinner and got to her feet, Neville was on his way out, too. "I'm sorry about that," he told her sheepishly as they fell in step together out of the Great Hall. "Flitwick sat down and got me into this whole discussion on—"

"It's fine, Neville," Hermione interrupted him soothingly.

"Still, it must not have been the most comfortable meal you've ever eaten."

"Surprisingly," she contradicted, "it was far from the worst."

He cast her an anxious look. "Are you feeling all right, Hermione? Because I'm sure that there's nothing worse than eating with—"

"Goodness, Neville. He isn't that bad."

The anxiety in his face intensified. "He isn't that bad?" he repeated disbelievingly. "Are you joking?"

She forced a smile, fighting down the twinge of annoyance that accompanied it. "I'm really not. We get along. Being left alone has done wonders for his disposition." She paused for a moment, wondering how much she ought to reveal to Neville, but decided that there was little harm in it. "In fact, he helped me re-organize the Potions storeroom this weekend. He was quite nice about it, too. Hardly make a single comment about my hair or my cat."

"Which continues to stalk him," he mused as they stopped outside of her office. She lifted her wand to take down the wards. "Say what you will, Hermione, I'll forever remember him as the git who scared the living shite out of me on a bi-weekly basis."

She chuckled. "If you insist." She opened the door and turned to face him, ready to bid him good night, when she recognized the look on his face. Flat determination.

"Hermione," he began.

"Oh, gods," she groaned. "Who put you up to this? Was it Harry?"

He stopped mid-sentence, looking puzzled. "It wasn't _anyone_," he retorted. "You've been holed up in this office by yourself—or, alternatively, with Snape, which can't be much of an improvement whatever you say—since coming back to the castle. You were never exactly social, but this is a new level of avoidance."

"I'm not avoiding anyone," she insisted.

"Then let's catch up," he suggested, leaning against her door frame. "One drink won't put you off patrolling tonight. Knowing you, you've already graded every composition you possibly can. You've got time. Humour me."

His blue eyes glinted with a hint of pleasure; he had her, and he knew it.

"Fine," she muttered. "Come in. Have a drink."

She poured them two glasses of wine while he strolled around her sitting room, commenting occasionally on the many bookshelves and décor. "It's nice," he finally pronounced as she handed him a goblet. "Very calm."

"Yes, it was a bit...woebegone...when I moved in. Slughorn didn't keep terribly good care of it. I think he was rather resentful. Severus got the larger space, on the first floor."

"Sev—oh." His brow furrowed. "You were serious. The two of you are on a first-name basis now?"

She felt the warmth in her cheeks and immediately hoped that the dim lighting from the fire hid the worst of it; she wasn't even sure why she was blushing. "Occasionally," she said lightly. "When he's in a good mood."

"I'm shocked," he muttered. "He was nearly as horrible to you as he was to me. A disposition not much improved by your success at saving his life."

"I think he forgets about that, as long as I don't mention it. Ever."

He chuckled, taking a sip of his wine. "So you're...what? Friends with Snape?"

She considered it, swirling her wine around in her goblet. The image of his face rose in her mind's eye; an amused glance, an annoyed look, the focus of duelling, quickly-hidden appearances of concern. The meticulously-written apology letter, the Dreamless Sleep that had allowed her a restful night. _Hermione_, written in his spiky handwriting.

"When he's in a good mood," she answered with a smile, and Neville shook his head dubiously, clearly unaware of what he was missing out on.

* * *

><p>At five to nine, there were voices chattering from beyond Hermione's office door. Severus paused to listen, fist raised to knock. He picked out her voice easily enough, but the male counterpart was unfamiliar. His jaw clenched unexpectedly. Who but Potter or Weasley would visit her?<p>

The voices abruptly ventured closer. "I'm sorry to cut this short, Neville, but I've got to patrol," she said, though her tone was not particularly regretful.

"With Snape, no less," he chortled, sounding quite merry. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. You two are more and more alike these days, the way you keep to your rooms—"

"Oh, hush," she replied in good humour. "I happen to rather like him. And there's nothing wrong with our behaviour."

_I happen to rather like him._

Surely his heart was not beating faster than usual at this unbelievable proclamation. _I happen to rather like him. _Six careless words from a damaged girl, and the beats were faster than their typical healthy resting rate. He would estimate it at seventy beats per minutes rather than fifty-nine. And rather loud, too. Perhaps it was the coffee. An old man could only take so much caffeine.

Before they could happen into the corridor and find him listening at the door, he knocked twice, loud and abrupt. A few seconds later, Hermione pulled the door open and smiled at him. "Good evening, Severus. I was just showing Neville out."

Her companion nodded to him, his disposition sobering instantly. "Professor." He turned to Hermione. "Watch out in the Forbidden Forest. You really never know what's in there."

She rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the concern, Neville. I'll see you later."

As Longbottom strode away from them down the corridor, she closed and locked her office, silently erecting the wards she favoured. He had a moment while she was turned slightly away to take her in: dark green sweater clinging to slightly malnourished curves, jeans, comfortable trainers beneath her thick cloak, her hair tamed into a braid, pulled back from her face. She was, of course, always practical rather than vain, choosing comfort over appearance.

She turned to face him again with a slight smile. The shadows beneath her eyes were lighter than they had been in weeks, and those orbs were tinged with gold again. Clearly, his Dreamless Sleep had had its desired effect. He noticed what he had failed to upon her first night in the castle: the womanly aura that now clung to her, the precise shade of her honey-brown hair, the warmth that radiated from her when she was happy.

Eighty-four beats per minute, he estimated. Definitely the coffee.

The coffee, or he was happy to know that his mistake had not ruined all her hopes of recovery.

_The coffee, _a voice whispered in his head as she walked at his side, speaking only when necessary, and sometimes humming, _or you rather like her, too._


	11. Page Four Hundred and Sixty Three

ELEVEN

_Page Four Hundred and Sixty-Three_

It had been a long, strange week.

Her new dining partner had been a large part of that strangeness. The chair next to Severus was a seat often empty, and frequently now at mealtimes, she would arrive to find the chair pulled out and food already waiting on her plate. He never mentioned a word about it, and certainly never spoke at breakfast at all except to bid her good day as he left, but she had a feeling that this was his way of showing concern. It was usually a hearty breakfast. Potato cakes, omelettes and egg scrambles (usually containing more vegetables than she thought the Hogwarts kitchens capable of), and piles of fruit were not uncommon. At lunch and dinner, her food was not usually laid out for her, but he passed her many dishes of things without being asked, following a similar vein of nutrition as at breakfast. Protein, vegetables, fruits. She suspected that he thought she looked too thin, and she had to ruefully agree that he was right, so she did her best to eat whatever he handed over, even if it had been many years since she had eaten so many full meals in a day.

"Severus Snape has never so much as passed anyone a butter dish before," Minerva commented directly after lunch on Wednesday. "Is he ill?"

"Has he ever been ill?" Hermione inquired politely, hoping to avoid responding to the more pertinent portion of the statement.

The older witch pursed her lips. "No, I suppose he hasn't." After a moment of further contemplation, she smiled at the Potions mistress. "He's clearly friendly with you."

Hermione coughed. "I wouldn't call it friendly, exactly."

"Passing the chicken is practically a marriage proposal from that man," Minerva replied, patting her shoulder. "Well, I'm glad. He could use some socialization."

Hermione was glad that she had locked her jaw; otherwise she might have spluttered as Minerva walked away to tell off a few third-years trying to bewitch a suit of armour. _It's just a turn of phrase_, she thought as she set off for her free period. _She surely doesn't think that..._

Not that she would mind! She was embarrassed to even be following her thoughts down that path, but if she allowed herself to consider it, freely, she could see little wrong with the match. Of course, it would never be terribly romantic, but she had always been a little nauseated by that sort of thing, anyway. He was certainly her intellectual equal, if not superior, and that was vital in long companionship. And there was no denying that something about him attracted her; perhaps it was those long fingers, or the silky hair, or the distinguished nose, or even those deep black eyes...

She shook her head, amused at herself. _As if he would ever have me_, she laughed inwardly. _Or as if I could honestly take up with a man who was once my professor! How absurd._

But she enjoyed his companionship when he was in the mood to speak. She was still wary, anxious about his motivations for treating her with any modicum of respect, thoughts of the previous Sunday lingering in her mind on more than one occasion. Once he made the effort to speak to her, however, she forgot any transgression within moments. They read many of the same journals, and at dinner he was willing to draw her into debates on various articles; it seemed that at breakfast (she suspected that he was not a morning person—the sheer amount of coffee he drank attested to that) he was in no mood to speak. The lunch hour was usually spent glowering out at the Great Hall, flashing black eyes sweeping to various pupils whom she assumed had caused a bother in earlier periods.

On Friday evening, as she tackled the remains of an incredibly delicious Black Forest Gateau, he leaned slightly closer to her to speak in an undertone. She automatically inclined her head to listen, still savouring a bite of cherry.

"Would it be acceptable to begin your lesson at seven, rather than nine? I am an old man, and I tire easily."

She had to bite her lip on a smile. He scowled at her in response. "You're hardly old," she protested mildly. "That's fine."

"Good. I shall see you at my office in an hour."

Her eyes followed him out of the Great Hall before she returned to her cake. While she was finally beginning to feel more at ease within the castle—her sleep had even improved, if marginally—Severus seemed to have suffered a decline in his health in the last week. She frowned, considering the possibility that he _was _falling ill. He hadn't sported dark circles under his eyes when she had first entered the castle, but over the last several days, the shadows there had grown deeper and deeper. He had been more paranoid during last night's patrol than usual as well. Perhaps he was having difficulty sleeping.

She mulled it over as she trekked down to the dungeons, looking forward to a hot bath before the Occlumency lesson. She could scarcely believe that it had been only a week since her first one. She hoped ruefully that the practising she had done before bed each night had actually done her some good; she was certainly dreaming less, though she wondered if she could attribute that to the one dose of Dreamless Sleep she had used earlier in the week. He was sure to be displeased if she had not made any progress...

She quelled her nerves and sank into her bath. Displeased, certainly, but she couldn't reconcile the Severus of the last four days with the Snape of her childhood. He was treating her...differently; she couldn't put it exactly right. No one else would call it friendly, of that much she was sure, but he was a special case. Minerva was right. He would pay her no mind at all if he disliked her as much as he had. But perhaps he was simply reacting out of guilt—

She held her breath and sank under the surface of the bubbles. It would really do no good to dwell on his motivations. He was a complicated man, and she enjoyed how he was treating her now, however strange it was. She wouldn't question it further.

It was with clean hair and pressed clothes that she made her way to his office at five to seven. She straightened the collar of her dark red, button-up shirt one last time before knocking briskly at his door.

"Enter," his deep voice called, and she felt a momentary thrill of foreboding before opening the door.

He stood over what she thought might be Dumbledore's old Pensieve; she had seen it only once, on the day of the final battle, as Harry carefully scooped Snape's memories from its insides. It had been that which had prompted her to flee to the Shrieking Shack, remembering the man she had left there hours before. The memory hit her with the force of a Stunner as she watched him prod at the contents, white shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, the shadow of his Dark Mark standing out on the pale of his forearm, many thick bundles of parchment surrounding his desk and filled in his black, spiky handwriting. She inhaled sharply, and he looked up.

He looked perhaps nearly as tired as she had ever seen him; surely the circles under his eyes could not have darkened since dinner? And the bloodshot red in the whites of his eyes was vivid. He was immaculate in every other regard, but she had never seen him look so worn without a trace of anger.

"Severus?" she asked uncertainly. "You look rather..." She changed the adjective, and her tact, at the last minute. "...busy...are you certain I'm not interrupting something?"

"No," he said sharply, but without malice or heat. "Come in. We'll go to my sitting room." He gestured toward his office door as he pushed open the section of bookshelf that led to his rooms, and she realized that, as tired as he looked, he had easily performed wandless magic to close the door and raise his wards.

The scene in his sitting room was not much different. The tables here were scattered with parchment, too, considerably less organized than those in his office.

"Are you working on a new project?" she asked with interest before she could reconsider the wisdom of prying.

He hesitated only a heartbeat before answering, "Of sorts." He gestured to one of the armchairs before the fireplace before casting the hearth a look, and flames erupted on the spot. She perched in her seat, wondering if he was attempting to unnerve her.

He seated himself in the armchair across from her and fixed her with his black gaze, and she realized that he was not just tired: he was unnerved, disquieted.

"What is it?" she asked—again, before she could stop herself. "Is something wrong?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Uncharacteristically perceptive tonight, are you?"

"No," she retaliated. "You're just uncharacteristically animated."

His look of bemusement passed quickly, and he surveyed her again, steadily, still with that hint of disquiet lingering about him. She fidgeted, anxiety turning to dread as she contemplated the possibilities.

"I wanted to speak with you before we began this lesson," he said finally, getting to his feet again and strolling across the room. "I must impress upon you how very...important...Occlumency must now become. To you."

She stared at his back, nonplussed, while his long-fingered hands rustled along the tables covered in parchment, searching for something.

"It was always important," she protested. "If you recall, I was the one asking you for help."

"Indeed." He turned back to her, holding a thick volume in his hand. It was nothing like any magical text she had ever encountered; in fact, it looked distinctly...Muggle...with its decidedly plain features and lack of leather binding. "And I ask that you remember that now. You wished me to become involved."

She stared back at him, utterly at a loss for what to say.

With what might have been a sigh, he bent his head over the book and opened it, rifling through the pages before finding the one that he wanted. Then, after a pause that only numbered a handful of her frantic heartbeats, he held the book out to her. She lifted numb fingers, strangely consumed with bafflement and dread, to take it from him.

Page 463, she would remember later, the stark text staring out at her. Confusion turned to horror as she scanned the writing, barely taking it in, while the bold letters at the top repeated in her mind. Her hand lifted to her mouth, trembling, as she heard them drill into her with insistence.

_Posttraumatic stress disorder._

* * *

><p>Severus willed her not to bolt out of the room at that very moment as the book changed hands. She looked on the verge of doing so, her anxiety and confusion written all over her face. And he thought, for a moment, that he had decided to reveal this to her too soon, that she was not ready for the knowledge of the severity of her own condition. She lifted a shaking hand to cover her lips as her eyes scanned the pages, too fast to be truly taking it all in.<p>

"Me." He was startled that she spoke so soon, albeit in a tremulous whisper. "I'm your new project." Her head lifted, and she stared at him with horror. He very nearly twitched as she rose to her feet; she hardly looked capable of supporting herself. "All this parchment is about _me_." She took a step toward the tables, but he smoothly intercepted her, blocking her access.

"How can you possibly have that much to say about me?" she whispered, staring around him. "You don't _know _me." Her frightened brown eyes found his again, and she swayed alarmingly, the book clutched to her chest, but as he made to steady her, she darted out of his reach.

"On the contrary," he intoned, "blessed be that my many years saving the Boy Wonder's neck were spent watching not just him but the two who followed him everywhere."

"This is why you're being nice to me, isn't it," she said, her voice a bit stronger now, as hurt crept into her features. "Because I'm..._ill_."

He frowned. "Nice? You were under the impression that I was being nice to you? You have terribly low expectations, if that's the case."

She glared at him. "You _know_ what I mean. You've been talking to me. Of your own free will. And you keep laying food out for me at breakfast as if you're afraid I won't eat. And Minerva says you've never so much as passed the _butter dish _to anyone before." Her eyes suddenly welled with tears, which she brushed angrily away. "And it's not because you like me, or because you're concerned. It's because I'm a _project_."

He pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers, still frowning at her. "Did you ever consider that perhaps the three are not mutually exclusive?" he asked dryly.

"But you _don't _like me," she muttered, staring at his feet. "I annoy you, I—"

"Yes," he interrupted, a small measure of frustration in his voice, "I dare say you do. But rest assured, I would not make conversation with you if I did not find your company enjoyable. I would not waste this time and energy on someone who is not worthwhile."

Her eyes filled with tears, and for a moment, he feared—with no small degree of exasperation—that he had offended her yet again. All worries on that count were dismissed, however, when his arms were suddenly full of Hermione Granger.

He had reacted on instinct as she threw her arms around his shoulders; fearing that she would unbalance herself, he caught her, his arms holding up her slight frame. He grimly confirmed that he had been right to feed her. With his arms wrapped around her, he could feel just how thin she was.

_With his arms wrapped around her_.

His solemn and clinical appraisal of her mental health vanished; he was now wholly aware of the girl—woman—Granger—Hermione—in his embrace. She sniffed once against his shoulder as he felt the heat of her body through the thin fabric of her pressed blouse, seeping into the palms of his hands, and he thought how long it had been since anyone had embraced him. He thought how awkward something like a hug was and how solid but fragile she felt. Awkward, but comfortable. Warm. Pleasant, even. So physical contact might have something to it, after all.

She pulled back from him, sniffing again, looking both embarrassed and horrified, and the pleasure evaporated almost immediately. _Of course_, a nasty voice sneered in his head, _she would be terrified at having so much as _touched _the greasy git—_

"I'm...I'm sorry," she stammered out, wiping her eyes. "I didn't mean to...it just...that was so nice of you." Her lips twisted against a potential sob. "I'm sure no matter how much you might enjoy my company, your personal space is still off-limits."

The pleasure was back. Almost immediately. _Look at the pair of us_, he mused grouchily. _Ever the candidates for more than one mood disorder._

He reached out to place a hand on her shoulder. "I prepared myself for much worse eventualities," he said bracingly. "I was rather convinced that you would throw both a number of valuable books and perhaps the Pensieve into the fire. Or that you would set _me _on fire. Again. I find this alternative rather more desirable."

And with that, she was smiling while tears trickled down her cheeks, and she was half-falling against him, and he was half-pulling her closer, already both dreading and craving how it felt to have someone so near. She cried quietly against his shoulder while he held her, unsure of what to do with his hands or how best to comfort her. He half-admonished himself for _wanting _to do such a thing, but tried to dispel his discomfort with that desire. He had already admitted the worst to himself; this was simply a component of it.

Except that it was not simple. He was Severus Snape, he had had exactly one friend approximately thirty years ago, and he had held the rest of the world at arm's length ever since, until now.

She was just one person, a shattered and terrified girl. She was broken and misguided and mistaken. She was placing her trust in the wrong man. But for a fleeting moment, despite his remaining misgivings about interfering with her life, he was pleased that she had chosen him. Pleased that he could look forward to more time with the first friend he'd had in three decades. Selfish, perhaps, but true.

She interrupted his long contemplations by finally pulling away, rubbing the back of her hand over her eyes. "I didn't mean to break down like that," she murmured, her eyes darting up to meet his briefly. "I'm just..."

"Overwhelmed?" he suggested shrewdly.

She nodded weakly. "I'm sorry. I've ruined your shirt."

He glanced down at the large wet patch near his shoulder. "The house-elves will spend days scrubbing salt out of my wardrobe on your account." Recognizing his sarcasm, she managed a small smile. He gestured toward the east wall of the sitting room. "The loo is through there, if you'd like to freshen up." He moved toward the tables to gather up the disorganized parchment there; he had been loathe to waste time with organization over the last several days.

She nodded, taking a few careful steps in that direction before halting. "Severus."

He looked up. When had she become so comfortable with his first name? He still struggled to properly form hers.

She took a deep breath. "Thank you," she murmured with absolute sincerity. Before he could react, she slipped out of sight.

Severus watched the place where she had vanished for a moment, and then roused himself to work. He moved the Pensieve back into his sitting room while he waited for Hermione to wash up, along with sheaf after sheaf of the parchment that had taken up residence in his office. He was certain that he'd hardly slept in the last few days—it was not a wonder that she had guessed so quickly that something was amiss. He grimaced. There had been a time, not long ago, when a slightly haggard Severus Snape would not have seemed so unusual to her. Clearly, he was becoming too used to small comforts.

He journeyed to his wardrobe to fetch a new shirt. Yes, certainly too used to small comforts.

Just as Hermione re-emerged from the loo, the fireplace flared green. Wearing similar frowns, they turned to look at it. The Headmistress's head was floating in his fire.

"Oh, there you are, Severus," she said mildly, her hat dangerously askew.

"Yes, Minerva, you've found me in my own quarters," he said, voice heavy with irony, as he strode forward with a swift warning glance at Hermione. She didn't look ready to face anyone else at the moment, though she appeared to have lost her resemblance to a hosepipe. He knelt down before the fire. "What is it?"

"You are aware that you're supervising the trip to Hogsmeade tomorrow, aren't you?"

He gave her a hard glare. "You never mentioned anything of the sort. Isn't the first Hogsmeade trip traditionally on the weekend of Halloween?"

"Yes, yes, but the school will be otherwise occupied that weekend, Severus. The students will need dress robes and a way to procure them." She inspected him with a critical eye. "You'll need some yourself."

"I'm certain I won't." He resisted the temptation to grind his teeth. "How will we be otherwise occupied?"

"A Masquerade Ball. Not to worry, all the staff will supervise—"

"You are not Minerva McGonagall," he interrupted bluntly. "I must have killed the wrong person. Clearly I murdered the Deputy Headmistress under the guise of Polyjuice Potion or some more infinitely clever ruse thought up by our dear Headmaster, who is, in fact, still with us, to torment and belittle me. So much the worse for me, I would have _vastly _preferred the death of that interfering megalomaniac—"

An incredibly strained giggle erupted behind him, and Hermione ducked back into the loo, shutting the door behind her.

Minerva appeared not to have heard, as her ears were enveloped in the crackling flames, but he thought that Hermione might have collapsed in there with the sound of that dull thud, and he was sure that she was shaking with laughter at this point, for the occasional squeak slipped from beneath the door.

And he almost smiled. Almost.

"Now really, Severus—"

"Please save the berating, Minerva," he said tiredly, "for it is Friday, and I am exhausted. Who is accompanying me to Hogsmeade?"

She looked at him severely. "Why, Professor Granger, of course. I'll nip off to notify her, as well—"

"Unnecessary," he interrupted smoothly. "She's on her way here. I shall inform her."

Her eyebrows nearly disappeared into her hairline. "On her way? To your rooms? For what purpose?"

"I offered to chop her into bits to be used in a rather interesting new potion I've thought of, and she was only too happy to assist," he replied drolly, and he thought he heard a renewed fit of giggles stream from beneath the door.

She fixed him with a beady stare, which he returned blankly.

"If it's a social visit, it wouldn't be difficult to just say so, you know," she told him disapprovingly.

"Yes, but I do enjoy your discomfort," he remarked, getting to his feet. "Good evening, Minerva."

She evaporated from his fireplace without another word, clearly not interested in playing victim to his more sarcastic tendencies for the night.


	12. Obsession

TWELVE

_Obsession_

She was in stitches. There was no other word for it. If she repeated to herself the words that he had so dryly uttered aloud one more time, she would not be able to breathe. And yet, she thought of them. Again. And had to bite down on her increasingly hysterical laughter, for still, she had never in a thousand years thought that Severus Snape could be so _funny_.

"You'll give yourself an aneurysm," he called to her from his sitting room; his footsteps drew closer. "Surely that isn't healthy..."

By the time he opened the door, she had managed to pull herself upright against the claw-footed bathtub, but she was still doubled over, clutching her stomach, completely winded and still laughing, rather loudly now that Minerva was gone.

"Can't help it," she choked out through giggles. "I wish I could have seen the look on her face!" She managed to straighten up, though the cramp in her stomach was now of incredible proportions.

"It was...displeased," he replied, "though rather more so when I mentioned chopping you to bits."

The laughter started again, and his smirk grew larger than she'd ever seen it; the corners of his eyes even crinkled, the black orbs flashing with quelled mirth. He was rather more open than he'd ever been at the moment, and she enjoyed it.

"It's no less than she deserved," Hermione finally rasped out, wiping her eyes, which had spilled over with tears of laughter. "A Masquerade Ball. What on earth is she thinking?"

"Dumbledore's portrait is doing some whispering in her ear," he said, his tone grim now. She followed him back out to the sitting room. "He always did want to try that. I always talked him out of it. They're planning something."

"Something absurd, no doubt," she scoffed. "No event that brings students together in an opportunity to get pissed off of whatever a sneaky seventh-year Slytherin spiked the punch with is a good thing."

He cast her a deeply amused glance. "Your incredible alliteration would lead me to believe that you're not fond of events such as these."

"No," she answered shortly. "I was put off the institution very quickly during my fourth year."

He moved to the Pensieve and probed the silvery substance inside it with his wand. "Did this incident have anything to do with it?"

She joined him at the table. The scene brewing in the surface of the Pensieve—much resembling a Muggle television, now—was familiar; the viewer moved steadily close to the conversation taking place at a table in the Great Hall. Couples were dancing out on the floor, but she recognized herself, walking to where Harry and Ron sat. It was a near thing, though; she had never truly thought on how much her features had changed in the last decade. She looked very much a teenager.

"Can we go inside?" she asked. He turned to her with a raised eyebrow. "I've...I've never experienced a Pensieve before," she admitted. "I was always jealous of Harry, but they're rather hard to come by, and..."

Without a word of complaint, his hand came to rest on her elbow. "Bend forward until your face touches the surface; you'll fall through. There's more you should see."

A small pit formed in the centre of her stomach at the dire implications of his tone. She pushed back the dread, focusing on her fascination with replaying an old memory like a film. She leaned forward until the cool liquid touched her nose. Immediately, she fell, Severus bumping along at her side. They landed rather lightly.

"You're there," she said with wonder, as she spotted a ten-years-younger Severus Snape lurking in a shadowy corner near the table where Harry and Ron sat. Taking a glance back at the present Severus, however, she concluded that he looked decidedly younger now. His past visage was sallow, haggard; she had not imagined the greasy build-up in his hair during her younger days, though it was absent now. "Gods," she whispered, taking in his hollowed eyes and automatically drifting closer. "Severus...you look terrible."

His bark of a laugh startled her; it lacked any humour and chilled her to the bone. It wasn't a laugh so much as an ill-sounding cough; clearly, he hadn't used those particular muscles in some time.

"The Dark Mark burned deeper and darker every day," he said quietly. "Dumbledore sought to prevent the impossible, but I knew that he would fail. And I knew that soon, the Dark Lord would rise again, and I would be a puppet for not just one man, but two—if I survived the summoning. I was contemplating many...regrets...on this night. But look." He nodded toward the table. "You'll miss the show."

"Hi," Harry Potter's voice piped from nearby, and she turned automatically toward her friend.

"It's hot, isn't it?" the Hermione in the periwinkle dress robes asked the other two, and for a moment, she flushed with pleasure at the memory of the first half of that dance: the looks of shock on the face of every member of her house and all the others, the victory in being on the arm of Viktor Krum, the way she had felt like just any other girl, having a good time at a dance with a date...

"Viktor's just gone to get some drinks."

"Cue typical Weasley jealousy," she muttered under her breath. Severus smirked.

Ron was glaring at her. "_Viktor_?" he demanded. "Hasn't he asked you to call him _Vicky _yet?"

Hermione-of-the-good-mood didn't take the bait. "What's up with you?" she asked, without any real concern.

But the surliness around Ron was bound to reach out and ensnare her soon. The scene turned ugly quickly, and Hermione fidgeted while her teenage self blurted out, "If you _really _want to know, he—he said he'd been coming up to the library every day to try and talk to me, but he hadn't been able to pluck up the courage!"

"Yeah, well—that's his story," Ron sneered.

"There," Severus murmured, and the room around them paused, the look of hurt on her face frozen, the snarl on Ron's lips captured.

"I didn't believe it myself, you know," she told him sadly, as they walked toward the table. "I reckon that's why what Ron said hurt so much. Viktor Krum, International Quidditch Sensation, wanted to take me to the Yule Ball." She chuckled. "I was sure Malfoy had put him up to it, but he was quite sincere."

She turned to look at the Severus standing in the shadows, and saw the strangest thing on his features. Pity. Sympathy, even.

She turned back to stare incredulously at present-day Severus. "You...felt sorry...for me?"

His bony shoulders lifted in a shrug. "Is it a wonder? Much as I vehemently denied it, you _were _the most clever witch of your age. It seemed a pity to be surrounded by such fools who could scarcely hold a candle to your brilliance, who only impressed upon you how different you were from them, and you, however subconsciously, grew to take _different _to mean _wrong_..."

She continued to stare at him, barely registering the compliment. "You...you miserable...You _identified_ with me, and all you could do was make my life _more _miserable?"

"It was unfair," he agreed. "But you appreciate my situation." He gestured to his past self. "By the time I had managed to look past the reek of Potter around you, it was too late. My behaviour could not change. Any sympathy would have made it back to the Dark Lord's ears...and Dumbledore very much needed me alive long after he returned..."

Her stomach twisted. She moved closer to his ten-years-younger self, staring up into the face of the man she had once loathed.

"You look so tired," she whispered. She looked back to him. "You look rather younger now, if you don't mind my saying so. And much healthier. The dungeons were truly terrible to you."

He grimaced. "Not nearly as terrible as I was to myself."

His discomfort was palpable as he watched her look at the Snape of the memory. He flicked his wand, and the scene dissolved and changed, reforming. Hermione recognized her first Potions class; her hand was in the air as Snape berated Harry. She frowned, loathe to be reminded of the humiliation.

"As you once were. Terribly eager to prove yourself. Very knowledgeable, if not particularly creative. Perhaps your robust nature was what led the Sorting Hat to bend to your wishes for Gryffindor." She shot him a look, but his tone was musing rather than scathing. "There is little difference between this..." He waved his wand again, and the scene contorted around them. "...and this."

She was a third-year, and she had spoken out of turn while he substituted for Professor Lupin. She was staring at the ground, her eyes full of tears as he insulted her.

"Or this," he continued.

She was a sixth-year, and she had just mastered a non-verbal spell. She looked around, beaming, expecting praise or House Points, and Severus merely swept by with a scowl.

"But then," he said, his voice quiet, "we have a change."

She sat in his N.E.W.T. level Defence class, head down, scribbling notes. When he questioned the room, she didn't put her hand up. She sat amongst a sea of other faces, not drawing attention to herself. He hadn't baited her at all during that year; he had scarcely even looked at her.

"And I don't believe you needed so much time in the library," he added.

Her heart hammered. She remembered this. It had been the first time Severus had said so much as a word to her since she had saved his life.

It was past curfew, and Hermione sat at a table near the window, her head down on the book that she had been reading from an hour before. Parchment, quills, ink, and various other tomes were scattered around her. She flinched to look at herself; her hair was tangled and bushy, standing nearly on end, and she looked unhealthily pale.

Severus entered the library, no doubt patrolling for wrongdoers, and noticed her lamp almost immediately. Scowling, he swept toward her table, a thunderous look on his face. Automatically, she followed him, drawing closer to the scene.

She was muttering in her sleep; there were tears on her cheeks, trickling down toward the book her head rested on. "No," her voice croaked suddenly, and Severus paused. "Please, Professor...I'll get you to the castle...almost there...don't die...please, don't die..."

Hermione flinched. The broken desperation in her voice reminded her of that terrible night. He could hardly have been in doubt about whom or what she was dreaming, and it seemed to give him pause. She moved closer, the better to see his face and the emotions there. Present-day Severus did not move to stop her.

Pain. Anger. Pity. Annoyance. Regret. His eyes stared at the sleeping girl before him, and he both hated her and felt for her, but he roused himself from his contemplations and the cold mask swept back into place on his features. She shivered. His eyes were a flat, cold black, a winter night where the lamps of the stars had been extinguished.

"Miss Granger," he said sharply. Immediately, Hermione jerked awake. Her hand flew to her wand, already levelling it at his chest, a curse on her lips, but he was faster. "_Expelliarmus!_" Her wand soared out of her hand and into his, and he stood, scowling, as she scrambled to her feet, breathing hard and fast.

"Professor," she said shakily, rubbing the cuff of her robes over her cheek. "I—I'm so sorry—"

"It is past curfew and you nearly just attacked a teacher," he hissed. "I suggest that you return to your common room before any other unfortunate events occur. Fifty points from Gryffindor."

He set her wand down on the table, rather harder than necessary, and glared at her. Hermione stood stock-still, lips trembling, and then, tears beginning to course down her cheeks anew, started to gather her things. She didn't protest the loss of so many points, she didn't try to defend herself; she merely cried, silently, while he watched her stuff her reading material, parchment and quills back into her bag. As soon as she could, she hurried from the room, head bowed, one last book clutched to her chest. A muffled sob echoed back to them from the corridor.

She got one last glance at Severus's face—something like regret lingering in those cold, dark eyes—before the man at her side tugged on her elbow, and they came out of the Pensieve.

* * *

><p>Hermione stared at the Pensieve, unmoving, her lips tight, her eyes blank. Severus sensed that she was doing absolutely all that she could not to crumble in front of him again; the last memory had surely touched a nerve.<p>

"I should have suspected then, but furious as I was at your misguided success in saving my life, I did not." His voice was quiet and apologetic. "I did not wish to give a single errant thought to you. For that, I apologise. Were it not for my behaviour, something could have been done sooner."

He saw the movement of her throat as she swallowed. "What, exactly, can be done, in any case?"

His eyes fixed on hers; her features were full of wariness.

"Your options are limited," he said slowly. "In the Muggle world, you would see a psychologist or psychiatrist. I regret to say that there is no such thing in our world, and you would be hard-pressed to find a Muggle therapist who understood what you have been through."

She stared at him beseechingly, waiting for an answer, but he waited in turn, knowing that her mind would catch up quickly enough.

"Occlumency," she said finally, the slightest note of desperation in her voice. "You said that Occlumency would be important."

He nodded once, a sharp jerk of his chin.

"But it will be more involved than that, won't it," she said quietly.

"You have buried your memories of the war, of what you experienced, and they have only grown more powerful with time." He held up a hand as she began to protest. "I am not blaming you. It is a natural response. But you must see that it cannot continue." He lifted his wand, and a floor-length mirror flew from a door, left ajar, in the corner of the room. "Mental health aside," he continued, "it has clearly begun to eat into your physical health. Look at yourself, Hermione. Truly look."

A flitting look of pleasure crossed her features, but almost immediately fled as she turned to gaze into the mirror. She regarded herself with displeasure, and he wondered if she could even see what he saw: too-prominent chin and cheekbones, her clavicle sticking out with uneasy prominence, eyes just barely sunk into the dark shadows surrounding them. Her make-up typically covered the worst of it, but she had cried that away, and now he saw how deeply those shadows were etched under her eyes. There was no hiding how thin she had become; surely she could see that much.

She swallowed again, harder this time, and her eyes flicked up and caught his in the mirror, mortification immediately colouring her features.

"Stop," she muttered. "Don't look at me like that."

She edged around the mirror and went back to her armchair, perching on the edge. _Her _armchair—for it seemed, even though she had entered his chambers only twice, she had made it hers. She stared at the ground, at the fire, at the bookshelves—determined, it seemed, not to meet his gaze, or to see the expression outlined on his face.

"How will it help?" she asked, her voice dull now. "Occlumency, I mean."

"Your mind is as sharp as ever. You know the answer."

For a handful of heartbeats, she hesitated. "You taught Harry Occlumency so that he could stop those dreams."

"Not that it ever took," he muttered, feeling a wave of annoyance sweep through him. "Some people simply haven't the skill."

She ignored this. "But they weren't ordinary dreams. They were things Vol—the Dark Lord—put there. I see how Occlumency helps, in that situation. But in mine?"

"Who is the enemy, if you consider your situation?" he asked, taking a few steps closer to her, toward his own armchair.

She paused only for a moment. "Myself," she murmured.

"Correct. It is not as simple, it is not as easy, but it can be done. You can learn to wall off portions of your own mind, to make it safe for you to seek rest."

"But...isn't that what I've been doing?" she protested. "You said I've buried—"

"Yes, buried them during daylight, so that they may torture you when you sleep. You have allowed your determination not to think of them to fill you, so that it is the centre of your focus. It leaves little room for anything else. Someday, you will not have to build walls. Someday, you will make peace with your memories. Until then, it is important that you re-learn how to sleep."

He lifted his wand. She immediately scrambled to her feet.

"Your walls will be less useful, for the time being," he said. "For now, concentrate on nothing."

She very nearly gaped at him. "How, exactly, am I to do that?" she asked.

"With practice," he answered, and cast the spell, sweeping into her jumbled and anxious mind; eyes wide with horror and panic, she stared at him. "The longer you flounder," he warned, "the more I have access to."

He followed her into her own head, trailing her at a distance as she receded deeper and deeper. Panic flooded her, tainting his own rigid calm with the flickers of memory she wished not to think of. As she darted out of the way of them, more appeared; he heard a faint, endless scream for a long few seconds before it was cut off, saw a younger Hermione sobbing under the steam of a shower, caught a glimpse of the milky pale of her forearm dripping with red. His stomach turned, but he brought himself under control.

_Clear your mind_, he told her. _There is nothing you can show me that I have not already seen._

Her thoughts echoed back at him, jumbled, panicked, and he worked to decipher them. They were on him now; he saw flashes of newspapers, reading she had done about Death Eaters and Dark Revels, the image of him at Death's door on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, and the curious but fearful question: what had he done—what had he experienced—throughout the course of two wars, and wouldn't it so clearly eclipse her own suffering?

He flinched at his own memories on the subject, but brought himself to heel again, suffusing his mind with calm so that she might follow his example. Her heartbeat hammered desperately through them both as she focused on it rather than anything else. He heard her begin to count the beats. _Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump._

Sharp outlines of memory made reappearances, but he watched her dissolve them as quickly as possible, returning to the study of her pulse. For long moments, she swayed in the delicate peace she had created in her own mind. Her fear was tangible; she trembled before him, visibly, clearly afraid that the peace would collapse as soon as an errant thought struck her.

Soon, however, it began to envelope her. The flickers of memory became more and more infrequent as the warm dark of nothing closed in, pulling his own conscious with it. He removed himself from her mind, resisting the temptation of sleep, soon enough to close the distance between them as she dropped, unconscious, toward the floor.

It was the success he hadn't dared hope for. It had only taken an uncomfortable twenty minutes, and she was asleep, breathing steadily and evenly, the lines that had formed permanently on her forehead suddenly smoothed. He lifted her slight weight—even lighter than he'd dreaded she would be—and carried her the few steps to his couch, gently laying her there. She immediately curled up, turning closer towards the back of the couch, seeking warmth. He summoned a blanket, letting it settle lightly over her before sliding a pillow beneath her head. There was a little sigh of contentment, and then she was still.

He watched her carefully for the first few moments, standing just a step away, his dark eyes tracing the features of her thin face. Her eyes didn't twitch; she wasn't dreaming. He took a few paces back and settled in his armchair to wait, reaching for a nearby book to pass the time. She had a sleep deficit that stretched back seven years; he thought it unlikely that the exercise would keep her calm enough to sleep for long, but sheer exhaustion might do the trick.

More often than not, he found himself distracted from the words on the page, gazing instead at the sleeping woman on his sofa. One of the visions from her head revisited him, and despite all that he had seen throughout two ugly wars, his stomach turned. The brightest witch of her age, slicing open her own flesh, capable of making herself bleed...surely someone ought to have noticed? The dunderheads who called themselves her best friends surely ought to have thought something off about her behaviour.

But they hadn't returned to Hogwarts with her. No, for the entirety of her late seventh year, she had been without them except on the rare occasion of Hogsmeade weekends. It would have been all to easy for her to hide her misery in the hopes of keeping it secret, so as not to worry them.

He snorted and turned back to his book. They could do with worrying a bit more.

An hour passed as he half-heartedly contemplated late-nineteenth-century Potions work and, alternatively, watched his charge. The fire had begun to burn low when she stirred, a yawn shaping her lips and crinkling up her nose. A little hum formed in her throat. He wryly thought that she was rather like a cat.

Then tension seized her, and her golden-brown eyes snapped open, searching her surroundings hurriedly. He immediately got up and moved to her side, bringing with him the cup of tea he had prepared only moments before.

"What happened?" she asked, her voice hoarse.

"You fell asleep," he answered, holding out the cup of tea to her.

She blinked at him and slowly sat up. The blanket fell from her shoulders, and he caught the befuddled look in her eyes as she considered it.

"For how long?" She reached out to take the tea and immediately took a sip, the hint of a smile curling up the corner of her mouth at the taste.

For a moment, he didn't answer, watching the easy comfort in her features and on those pink lips, and feeling thoroughly disconcerted by it. Only when she looked at him, puzzled, did he answer.

"About an hour. You didn't talk. Did you dream?"

She shook her head slowly. "No. No, I...I didn't."

"It will not always be so, but if you can maintain that mindset as you fall asleep, the effects will become stronger over time." He observed her closely as she sipped her tea. "It's not a permanent solution."

She looked up at him. "Is there one?" she asked, her voice small.

"It will require a great deal more bravery than you have been asked to show in the past," he answered.

She waited, staring at him over her tea.

"Facing your memories is the only way to make peace with them."

She immediately understood what he was implying; horror overtook her features. "I'd hardly call that therapeutic," she whispered.

"It won't be easy. You've given them power which they don't have." His black eyes strayed to her forearm, and she self-consciously tugged at her sleeve, making sure the scars were concealed. "But it must be done. Unless..."

"Unless what?"

"Unless you would be content to suffer forever." His tone was purposely ominous. "Understand that you would not be the only one. It will consume you until your friends, thick as they may be, will not be able to help but notice. It will twist you until you are unrecognisable to them. And then, you will be truly alone."

He got to his feet and turned to stoke the fire.

"Is that what happened to you?" her voice reached out and whispered to him.

He felt his back stiffen immediately in defence; his tone was unnecessarily curt as he responded. "I had no friends, save one. You know the story."

"I...I don't." Her voice was hesitant, almost breathless, as though with fear. "I know the gist, of course, but Harry wouldn't...details failed him. I suspect some of it may have shown his father in an unflattering light, and he so hates...talking about that..." He listened to her, dreading the next fifteen minutes, when he was certain he would have to tell a story he had long hated repeating even to himself. "I know you loved her, that's all," she finished gently. "That everything you did for Harry, for us, was for her."

He turned to regard her, still tense, but curious about some of the information she had revealed. "Potter told you nothing more?"

"No," she said. "I'm not sure why. I only know that from that point forward, his gratitude toward you has been overwhelming. Obviously unwanted, yes," she clarified, as he scowled, "but quite the turnaround from how he felt about you before."

He continued to contemplate her, and then, with a stifled sigh his hand lifted to rub his temples. "Just ask, if you're so infernally curious." His voice was rough, resigned, his tone harsher with her than it ought to be; his reluctance to share this particular life story was fierce. He could not, however, expect her to trust him—and her trust in him was essential, if she was ever to be well again—if he did not trust her with this. It was the most basic test of any friendship that secrets must be told, and he supposed that he was now privy to too many of hers to continue concealing all of his own.

But fuck all; he desired nothing less than to be asked to speak _her _name while in Hermione's presence, to talk of _her _while his eyes considered the girl he was trying to mend. The knowledge of his past and Lily Evans Potter was sure to change the way Hermione thought of him, considered him, even looked at him..._but why does it matter? _he interrupted himself. _Why do I care what she thinks?_

He just cared. To want her trust at all, he had to care. To be at all interested in helping her, he had to care.

"I didn't want to annoy you," she said honestly, interrupting his increasingly worrisome thoughts. "I just...it's always interested me, that's all. If it could change Harry's mind about you..." She shrugged and leaned back. "Then again, my mind hardly needed changing, so it wasn't so important. Just curious."

He glared at her for a moment before residing himself to the task, sweeping his interest in her feelings out of his mind.

"My mother was a witch, my father a Muggle. But then, you worked that out, when Potter got his hands on that old Potions book of mine." He paused, remembering the trials of that particular year, and saw in her eyes that she remembered them too. "He didn't know, until after they had married and she was pregnant. He snapped her wand the instant he knew to do it. She was a Pure-blood, knew nothing of the Muggle world, had no way to escape his hold. He had been...charming, but then...magic frightened him. _I_ frightened him. He was furious...furious that his offspring would be just like her, that the family name would be tarnished by magic.

"When I could move about on my own I didn't linger if I could help it. I took long walks, far away from Spinner's End, and that was when I first saw Lily Evans. She was..." The name gave him pause for a second; how long since he had spoken it aloud? It didn't have the same power it once had: to turn him end over end with guilt and regret. "She fascinated me. With that sister of hers, she had to be Muggle-born, but it became obvious that she was brimming with magic. I watched her. I was too afraid to speak to her, yet. Afraid that she would mock me for being the poor boy from Spinner's End. The poor, weird boy. I had already found my mother's tomes on the Dark Arts...I was already practising magic whenever I was alone. The Muggles thought I was a freak." He heard the bitterness in his own voice and stifled a wince at the sympathy in her gaze. "They weren't far off. I looked the part.

"But I finally did confront her. I told her what she was. And after some initial disbelief, she believed me. It was more than I could have ever hoped for...she was well-cared for, pretty, friendly, and she clung to me because I was her one tie to the Wizarding world. We arrived at Hogwarts and I knew that she could never, in a hundred thousand years, be sorted into Slytherin, but I still hoped, because otherwise, I was no longer her lifeline—and I surely couldn't remain important to her for long. She would have new, better friends...

"She wasn't, of course. She was sorted into Gryffindor, and I into Slytherin, and I thought it was the end of our friendship, but she still sought me out. We stayed friends—best friends—until our fifth year." He turned to stoke the fire, momentarily caught in the regret of the memory. "I'm surprised she turned a blind eye to what I had become for so long. I hung around with soon-to-be Death Eaters, took part in tormenting and bullying others. But as long as I treated her the same as I always had, she did her best not to notice.

"Then James Potter publicly humiliated me, used one of my own spells against me—_Levicorpus_, you'll remember it—and as she tried to come to my defence, I called her a Mudblood." Hermione flinched automatically at the slur. "You can imagine the repercussions. No matter how I apologized, she wouldn't hear it. She had, as she said, been making excuses for me for years, and this, finally, was inexcusable. She wouldn't tolerate the insult to her person, and she only tolerated my treatment of others for so long because...well."

"Because you were her friend," she answered softly. "That's what friends do."

He laughed, only a dark chuckle, but the ill sound clearly unnerved her. "From that point forward, I had 'friends', but we knew one another as much as one Death Eater knows and likes another. The instant I left Hogwarts, I took the Dark Mark. You know of the prophecy made, about the Dark Lord and Potter? I listened at the door as Trelawney recited it for the first time to Dumbledore, but I only heard the second half of the prophecy, and when I passed it on to the Dark Lord, I learned that I would have done better to never speak of it." His lips twisted. "I asked him to spare her, but he didn't make a habit of mercy. So I put my trust in Dumbledore, promised him that I would do anything if he would only keep her, and yes, her family, safe..."

He fell silent. Tears sparkled in Hermione's golden-brown eyes. It was only with enormous force of will that he held the gaze which contained so much sadness for him, when he certainly did not deserve it.

"So I promised that I would protect her son, the boy she had died to save. For her. Expecting to be left in peace at the end of it all. Of course," he said finally, his voice heavy with irony, "things do not always go as planned."

"I can kill you now, if you'd like," she volunteered without a grain of conviction, her voice heavy with emotion. "To rectify my...interference."

"No," he replied simply. "I would gladly have faced death then. I have no interest in it now."

They didn't speak for a long moment.

"Do you still love her?" she asked, her voice quiet.

He considered the question, thought of how few the nights were now that he conjured the silver doe, thought of the rare appearances she made in his dreams. "I miss her," he answered finally. "My...obsession...has long since waned. It is hard to love the dead. I cherish the memory of her—I regret, deeply, the part I played in not only her death but the unhappiness I caused her—but I love her only as one loves a long-lost friend, without any expectations."

That much was true, he thought. There were times when he still ached for her, so deeply that it wrenched him with guilt and despair, but they were infrequent. _Time_, he thought, with unease at his waning loyalty and relief for his own health, _cures many things_.

Her voice was small when she spoke again; she had perceived, correctly, that he wished to say no more on the subject.

"When?" she asked. "When and how will I face my memories?"

He regarded her. "We will start small. Next week...we will use the Pensieve. It will be the most effective method."

"How many are there, like me?" Her voice trembled. "Are there other people, suffering, who have no idea..."

"Perhaps many," he answered. "If those charms Potter keeps sending out are any indication...in the aftermath of any war, there are consequences. Wizards pride themselves on being all but immune to most Muggle diseases and have long ignored diseases of the mind as a result."

"It's...we have to do something. _I _have to do something." She got to her feet and began to pace. "Perhaps I could make leaflets..."

"Oh, dear. I've just given you your next house-elf project, haven't I?" Despite his exasperation for her tendency to leap to concern for unknown others, he felt a brief tenderness for the strength of her heart—the unwavering love she so easily expressed for the weak and downtrodden, even while she was so weak and downtrodden herself.

"It's terrible!" she exclaimed, wringing her hands. "If other people _feel _like this, if...if there's something that can be done to help them...this is a horrible way to...not to live, but to exist. Just...existing."

"I know," he answered quietly, watching her pace.

Her feet were beginning to wear a path in the floor. "You do, don't you?" she asked desperately. "That's how you knew, about me. Because you must have...you've been through much worse than me. For much longer."

He nodded once.

"Are you..." She trailed off, but he guessed the gist of her question.

"I'd hardly say I'm the picture of mental health," he replied with exasperation. "But I never was. There is a fine line between 'mood disorder' and 'personality'. I have bad days, bad weeks, bad months...you walked in on one, when Minerva touched a nerve, a few weeks ago. You remember?"

"I couldn't forget," she muttered. "You're a fantastic dueller."

He ignored the compliment. "But there has been...improvement...since the end of the war. You stand a much better chance of recovery than I."

"Don't say that," she protested.

"It's true." When she attempted to protest again, he cut across her. "I was a double agent for the better part of twenty years. I was made to do things under the Dark Lord's tenure which would haunt any man. It will take at least the time it did to do the damage to heal it, if it's at all possible. I operate in primarily guesswork now, struggling to form magical solutions to a problem that has never been considered. It is not easy. But your case, though I do not belittle your suffering, is much simpler than mine. Fewer ambiguities, fewer traumatic memories. You _will _recover," he added, his voice brooking no room for argument, "and until then, you'll shelve the desire to help anyone else. Myself included."

She nodded, agreeing, but half-heartedly and unhappily.

"Now, I suggest you return to your rooms and practice what we attempted tonight. Hopefully, you'll experience a night of relatively dreamless sleep. Though I must insist...if they reach their original magnitude at any time, you have access to the potion. Use it. Every now and again will not harm you."

She nodded again, still half-hearted. Her fear of dependency was clearly great.

"And do try not to be late in the morning, if I'm to supervise the brats, I require at least a modicum of intelligent company," he added, voice wry.

She smiled at him as he showed her out. "Coming from you, that's a glowing recommendation," she said happily. "Good night, Severus."

Late that night, pouring over her memories and his notes, cross-referencing magical and Muggle texts, he thought of that smile—full of gratitude, warmth, respect, trust. The sound of her voice saying his name played itself over and over again in his mind, analysing the nuances, considering her expression. He considered that he was becoming obsessed with the healing of Hermione Granger, or perhaps with the girl herself, and could not find the willpower to curb his interest.


	13. Crookshanks

THIRTEEN

_Crookshanks_

Hermione Granger was coming to enjoy the company of Severus Snape far too much for her own comfort.

There was, for one, the fact that he knew simply too much about her. She baulked at the thought of all those pages of parchment, the meticulous notes, the seemingly endless memories; she had never guessed how closely he had watched the three of them, all those years at Hogwarts, but now she had no doubt that it had been very closely indeed. How often had he been in the shadows, witnessing what any of them had believed to be an utterly private conversation?

There was, in addition, the invaluable information she now knew about him. Perhaps Harry had the better image of it; perhaps the memories had conveyed the story better; but she could still hear his voice, resounding in her head, and it spun pictures enough to accompany his words. She was well aware that she now understood Severus Snape perhaps better than anyone, with the exception of Dumbledore, had. His memories had been handed to Harry in a moment of desperation, not in an act of trust. With her, though, it had been entirely different. He was making an effort to trust her. She could see it in the way he thought about the question she posed him before he answered it; he had taken a moment to examine his thoughts and feelings, to determine the truthful answer.

And there was, finally, the stunning realization that Severus Snape, of all people, was not only capable of physical affection, but also adept at calming hysterical witches, which she never would have believed possible before the previous night.

It frightened her.

It was with some small anxiety, then, that she took her seat next to Severus at the staff table the next morning. She tucked into the large bowl of porridge—stuffed with honey, fruit, and granola—already waiting at her place with a slightly lighter heart. She was only frightened because the behaviour was so unusual, she reassured herself. It was something enormous and strange, to attract so much of his attention, and in a positive light, even, rather than the negative.

"Good morning," she said quietly, as she usually did, though as usual, she expected no response; he had not yet even touched his first cup of coffee. The shadows under his eyes remained as dark as they had been the night before. She wondered if he had slept, and doubted the possibility. He seemed to be slowly returning to the haggard, vulture-like man he'd been a decade before. She felt her stomach turn at the thought.

"You know," she began, and as she'd hoped he would, he turned to her, his black eyes burning, not to be tested prior to noon. She couldn't say the words she needed to aloud, not without the scrutiny of the Headmistress, just down the table, or Flitwick, right at her elbow; so many things were best left unheard. If he understood, though, that she had something to tell him, something to convey, he had methods of reading that information...

She felt him sweep into her mind, and made no attempt at her usual barriers. She found it hard to formulate the exact words she needed, and while she felt his impatience gnawing at her, she narrowed her focus enough to draw up two images: the Severus Snape she had been more familiar with this term, and the one who sat beside her now, and displayed them for him, side-by-side.

She could feel his distaste for even considering his reflection, but she finally tamed her thoughts and conveyed her message, the reason why she showed him what she saw. _I can't allow you to help me if you won't sleep, _she said, and unbidden, the memory of his arms around her rustled through her; she wondered if, hoped, and feared he felt the swell of affection in its wake, the fondness she suddenly possessed for him. _I can't allow you to worsen, yourself, because you're rushing to help me. It's going to be a long process. A few sleepless nights on your part will not put us that much further ahead. And worrying that I'm contributing to your decline in health will not help me, either._

He held her gaze a second longer before giving a single sharp nod of assent. _As you wish_, he demurred before withdrawing from her mind.

She returned to her porridge, he to his coffee and toast. A quick glance down the table ascertained that none of the professors had noticed anything amiss, and what would there have been to see? An over-long glance, perhaps, between the two most anti-social staff members Hogwarts currently possessed, but it could have been anything, including a glaring match, which anyone would agree that Severus and Hermione were wont to do, especially over breakfast.

When she finished her meal, she returned to her quarters to gather heavier clothes for the trek to Hogsmeade. It was bound to be uncomfortable out-of-doors, and she wasn't entirely fond of cold. She checked on Crookshanks before she made to leave. The cat had been unusually quiet this last week, sleeping more often than usual, and it was beginning to worry her. He was still dozing near the burned-down embers of her fireplace. She nudged him with her foot.

"Crooks," she said, and one sleepy eye batted open. "We're going to Hogsmeade. I'll be back later. There's food, if you'd like some."

The cat closed his eye again with a yawn and returned to sleep.

"All right, then," she muttered, pulling her mittens on. "Suit yourself, you great lazy beast."

She found Severus again in the courtyard, a long list of names and a quill in his hands, checking off every student who passed him by. She joined his side, noting the uncomfortable fear on the face of every student who approached. At nine precisely, he rolled up the parchment, glanced at her in what she imagined to be an exasperated, commiserating way, and gestured for the group to get going. They brought up the end; his height allowed him to see well in front of him, watching closely for signs of anyone sneaking off during the walk to Hogsmeade.

They strolled side-by-side in silence, his long legs easily taking one stride for every two of hers. When it began to snow, he wordlessly gestured upward, as if to create a barrier, but she caught his wrist before the magic left his fingertips. Webs of blue crackled on his skin, and she felt the jolt of power sweep through her at contact; it was a deep, dizzying well, and it seemed to go on forever.

"No," she protested. "The snow is lovely. As long as it isn't a blizzard, I can stand it without the shield."

A wordless spark of exasperation kindled in his black eyes, but he desisted, and she thought she caught a glimpse of affection in his gaze before she released his hand and he looked forward again, his expression neutral.

It was something, she realized, to see an absence of irritation or annoyance on his features. He certainly wasn't expressing pleasure of any sort, but the lines around his mouth had relaxed; despite his newly haggard appearance, he still appeared at ease, as if nothing was bothering him at this precise moment. Hiding her smile, she bid him goodbye at the door to a clothing shop, which he answered with a cordial nod before going on his way.

It wasn't long before the shopkeeper wandered over, and started to suggest dress robes that might suit her. "Those would be lovely with your eyes, dear," she mentioned, for a third time as she gestured to yet another rack.

Hermione suppressed the urge to snort. The hideous pink robes were too bright for her taste, and hardly covered a thing. No, if she was going to be attending this absurd ball that Minerva insisted upon, then she would wear something that suited her, and vivid shades of appalling colours had never suited her. The thing looked disturbingly similar to the robes Pansy Parkinson had worn to the Yule Ball, more than a decade ago.

Firmly putting Pansy Parkinson out of her mind, she asked the shopkeeper, "Do you have anything in green?" The plump woman turned toward a rack of neon. "Not bright green," she corrected herself hastily. "Something darker, more subdued, closer to a black..."

The shopkeeper pursed her lips, clearly not impressed with her choice of colour, but went to look for something suitable. Hermione cast a disinterested eye over the nearest racks as well, her mind wandering.

She had slept relatively well last night, she remembered. The nightmares were shadows of their former selves; she had done the thing properly before falling asleep, but it had been difficult, and it was not hard to understand why. She had been borrowing Severus's strength the first time she tried; he had been in her mind, already a calm presence in the eye of a storm, and she had clung to him, following his example. It had been very nearly _easy_. But doing it alone, curled in the dark of her bedroom, had been another story.

Still, it was a better night's sleep than most, and she had hopes now that Severus would do the same. The concern for his haggard appearance was weighing on her; even surrounded by frilly and idiotic robes, she was more interested in the well-being of the man she'd left at the door.

"Try this, then, Miss."

The shopkeeper handed it over with distaste, but Hermione knew immediately that she had found the appropriate match. The dark green, embroidered with silver—which crept, vine-like, from the hem of the floor-length dress, and wound in thin patterns of flowers around the bodice—would go with her complexion much better than any bright pink robes would.

"Yes, I rather like this," she said happily, and, as another item caught her eye, added, "and I'll take that mask, too—the black, with silver trimming."

"Step right up, then, we'll get it fitted."

They moved into the fitting room, where Hermione stripped out of her clothing and slid into the dress, already admiring it in the mirror. The material was thick enough to accentuate her curves without drawing notice to how thin she had become, and if she kept eating the way she did, she would fill it out rather well by Halloween. While the shopkeeper hummed and prodded, she looked into the mirror, wryly pleased that even if she wouldn't enjoy the ball, she would feel lovely sitting in the corner.

* * *

><p>Severus spent a large portion of the day in a local book shop, conversing at some length with the chap who ran the place, and then some time browsing the shelves. It had been quite a while since he had visited this particular shop; it had been summer, in fact. Usually, he would have made the journey to Hogsmeade himself by now, but in the past month, he realized that he had been otherwise occupied. It had only been a matter of weeks, but the girl—Hermione, he corrected himself—had already altered his typical routine.<p>

Try as he might not to think of what had transpired at the staff table that morning, his mind wandered to it yet again. He had never been a _guest _in anyone's thoughts before. Such a thing had never really occurred to him. She had made clever use of his skill, though, and all with a few words and an open, unguarded look, one that simply invited him into the sacred space that was her mind. He felt mildly impressed—a little irritated, yes, but impressed. He supposed that it took longer than a few weeks to totally eradicate some of the leftover condescension he felt for her; what lingered now was merely in the wake of his realization of her brilliance.

As for what had transpired there, however...he brooded over it as the tailor at a local shop fitted some classic dress robes for him. Minerva had ambushed him that morning and made it quite clear that he could expect repercussions if he did not seek out new robes, something other than the "moth-eaten monstrosity" that he wore whenever conned into a formal event. He was required, too, to locate a mask. He chose one which covered only his eyes; he wanted there to be no doubt to students who he truly was at this horror of an event.

He was not the most functional human being, in terms of emotion, but he understood with perfect clarity the emotions of others. It had been necessary, for so long, for him to read and manipulate others, and so he easily interpreted the emotion in Hermione's mind when he had been present there. There was worry, anxiety, sadness, and guilt as she considered his sleepless visage. More interesting was the resurgence of memory, of the embrace they had shared the night before, and the strength of the affection that accompanied her recollection of it.

She had not been lying to Longbottom; she truly did quite like him. He was half-horrified, half-pleased at the idea. It was so pure, her fondness for him. In that memory, it was fierce and bright, powerful, unwavering. It was absurd, he told himself, frowning as he passed over coin for the dress robes and returned to the snowy street. It was foolish of her, he told himself, catching sight of her mane of curly hair in the distance. It was foolish of her to grow fond of someone like him.

But he saw the evidence, now, in her fleeting actions. She rolled her eyes at him over the heads of a pair of Hufflepuffs she was trying to separate, and he automatically smirked in response; she walked quietly at his side, sharing his solitude, as they returned to the castle; she argued animatedly with him over dinner, her eyes frequently returning to his face, sparkling in the heat of their argument (Would wandless magic ever have a proper place in the curriculum?); and in her glance, in her fleeting smile, he saw the strength of her friendship, fast and unwavering.

It was still on his mind shortly after dinner as he returned to his quarters and poured himself a snifter of brandy. He was brooding over it before his fire when the frantic knock sounded on his door.

He was on his feet immediately, wand drawn, his glass broken on the floor. It was an old instinct, but he was glad that it was still sharp; there had been a time when a knock like that could only have boded ill.

"Severus!" her voice cried, through layers of wood and books, and he swept immediately toward his office.

When he wrenched open the door, wand at the ready, there was nothing terrible to greet him; there was only Hermione, a limp cat in her arms, her face a mask of anguish.

Understanding instantly, he held out his arms. "Summon Hagrid and Minerva. I'll run some preliminary examinations. How long...?"

"He's been lethargic all week," she answered in a trembling voice, gently placing Crookshanks in Severus's arms. "I thought it might just be the weather, but when I went back to my quarters, he...he's not...?"

"Not yet," he answered, though he knew without doubt that there would be little, if anything, that he could do. "Summon Hagrid and the Headmistress, and then join me in the sitting room. Leave the wards down."

The glow of her Patronus burst to life against the darkness of the hallway connecting his office and quarters; he felt a brief moment of appreciation for her magic, which had evolved in the last few years, after all. She had always found it difficult to cast a Patronus in stressful situations during her youth...

Her footsteps hurried after him as he gently laid the cat on a clear table. The yellow eyes were open; the beast meowed once, very quietly, his paws outstretched and form still limp. Hermione hung back, watching with fearful eyes as Severus raised a wand over the cat and began performing diagnostic spells, searching for the problem. While he worked, he spoke.

"Hagrid is, more than likely, much more familiar with this hybrid than I," he said calmly, hoping that the explanation would soothe her. "Minerva will be able to communicate with him; she has mentioned that they've done so in the past."

"Yes," Hermione answered, her voice tiny as she stared at her cat.

Minerva arrived first, slightly out of breath. "Goodness," she said, taking in the scene. "My dear..." She turned immediately to Hermione. "I'm so very sorry..."

"Help him," the younger woman managed, and for a moment, she looked the part of the terrified, desperate girl who had woken him to his second life, eyes wild with horror.

She had every right to be frightened. The diagnostic spells confirmed what he had expected from the outset; her familiar, her companion of the last twelve years, was dying.

"You've been able to communicate with the cat in the past," Severus said, straightening up from his examination. Minerva seemed to understand the look on his face, and her features fell.

"Yes," she said sadly. "Yes, I shall see what he can tell me."

Hagrid lumbered into the room just as soon as the headmistress had transformed and leapt up to the table, meowing. "'Ermione," the great man said, looking quite crestfallen, "I came jus' as soon..."

"How long do cats usually live?" she interrupted the half-giant, her face suddenly a mask, devoid of feeling.

He hesitated, his eyes on Crookshanks and the tabby cat. "I'd say...twelve ta fourteen years, tha's about righ'."

"And Kneazles?"

"'Bout twice as long."

Hermione turned back to her cat, lips quivering, her hand at her throat. "I don't know how old he is," she said quietly, her voice shaking. "I've never known. The woman at the shop said that he'd been there quite a long time, and he wasn't a kitten when he came to them, either...and that was twelve years ago..."

Hagrid reached out to pat Hermione gently on the shoulder as Minerva returned to her human form. "Twenty-three," she said gently. "A long and healthy life, but..." She hesitated, glancing at Severus.

"All his organs are in the process of shutting down," he said as Hermione met his gaze. Her chest heaved with a silent sob. "I can do nothing. It is a natural death; he is tired. Unless, Hagrid...?"

The half-giant shook his head. "Yer right. Nothin' we can do."

"I can ease his passing," Severus continued, his eyes still on Hermione's. "It will be quick and painless."

She hesitated only a second before giving a short nod. Minerva was scribbling on a spare piece of parchment, and as she made to leave the room, she handed it to Hermione. "He wanted you to know," she said gently. "I'm so sorry, my dear, but Crookshanks was very happy with you."

She nodded, her face bloodless, as the headmistress squeezed her shoulder and left, followed by Hagrid, who had to duck to fit in the passage between sitting room and office.

"Dreamless Sleep will do it," he said, as gently as he could. She moved closer, the parchment clenched in her hand. Her knuckles were white. "It is powerful enough to end the process."

She nodded again, and he reached for the vial. When he uncorked it, though, she spoke, her voice small.

"I'll do it."

He handed the vial to her; her hands didn't shake.

"Here, Crooks," she said softly, leaning toward her cat. Severus took a step back, watching as she smoothed the fur back on the feline's head. "You've been such a lovely cat. You've been the best, most loyal friend I've ever had. I'll miss you so much, darling."

The cat meowed, softly, and with a muffled sob, she tipped the contents of the vial into his mouth. "Sleep now," she said, her voice choked. "You've earned it."

It only took a moment, as Severus had promised. The cat went limp, the eyes closed as if in sleep, and the light went out of him, until it was they two in a room with a body, and the first true sob of anguish ripped from her throat. He stepped forward, comfort tentatively offered, and she pressed her face to his chest, crying freely now. As he wrapped his arms around her, stroking her hair to calm her, he glimpsed the parchment, abandoned on the table beside her dead familiar with a handful of words visible.

_Trust the scarecrow man._


	14. The Seeker

FOURTEEN

_The Seeker_

The words burned a hole in her pocket while her hands knotted around Severus's handkerchief. Hermione sniffed, trying to hold in the fresh sob that threatened to overcome her; it had been at least an hour, now, since she had shed a tear, and she hoped the worst of the onslaught was over.

_I've been very happy._

She lifted a shaking hand to her eyes, squeezing them closed. The words were burned into her mind, lit into the darkness behind her eyelids.

_I've held on for some time, because you still needed me. I am very old. Tired._

The image of the small grave they had dug in silence in the Forbidden Forest rose, forlorn, to the surface. The marker gave only his name.

_You will be all right now_.

Severus's weight dipped the couch beside her; he had returned from fixing tea. She heard the soft rattle of the tray being placed on her coffee table and then his patient silence as he waited for her to recover.

_Trust the scarecrow man._

Sniffing one more time, she dabbed at her eyes and straightened, slowly, painfully.

"Tea?" Severus asked quietly, already reaching for one of the cups.

She nodded, let the handkerchief flutter to her lap, and accepted the cup from his hands. The warm scent of apples and honey unfurled against her skin, warm and comforting.

"Chamomile," she said in surprise, her voice rough from crying.

"It will help you sleep. Not so well as Dreamless Sleep, perhaps..."

She shook her head and took a sip of the steaming tea. "This will be fine," she murmured, and then, because she knew nothing else to say, "Thank you."

He did not appear surprised, but she felt his black gaze on her face, questioning her gratitude.

"It's just," she said, staring down into her tea, "I know you didn't like him, but...you were very kind." She took a deep, steadying breath, ridding herself of the temptation to start crying again, and let it out shakily. "You could have...sneered, and made cruel comments, but you didn't. You comforted me. So thank you."

He was silent for a long moment, considering his own tea, before he spoke.

"You found Crookshanks when you were a third-year?" he asked at last.

Surprise gave her pause; she glanced sideways at him to find him still immersed in the study of his tea.

"Yes," she answered finally. "I had some money, for my birthday, you know, and I thought I might get an owl, but he came out of nowhere, nearly scalped Ron trying to get at Scabbers...and I just couldn't leave him there. He was so ill-tempered, the woman said no one had shown any interest in him for well on a year, that he'd been abandoned and found in a back corner of Diagon Alley. So I got him instead of an owl. It's funny, isn't it? The way a familiar attaches to a witch or wizard." She took another sip of her tea, fighting the burning sensation in her sinuses.

"It is...rare," he said slowly.

She glanced at him in surprise. "What do you mean?"

"Dumbledore and Fawkes, the Dark Lord and Nagini...they are the most prominent examples of wizards with familiars, with _attached _familiars. Most witches and wizards today merely have pets. The relationship is less equal than it once was. Crookshanks had enough agency of his own to qualify, I believe, as a familiar. He displayed an interesting aptitude for manipulation, for one. And the ability to perceive tricks, and therefore provide aid to a human being, as he did during your third year...he was an unusual cat."

"'Interesting aptitude for manipulation'?" she repeated warily.

He finally looked at her. "Your cat wanted to help you, desperately," he told her. "He did everything in his power to do so." A clock began to chime, far above them; it was midnight. "Try to sleep," he said, setting his cup carefully back on the table, almost completely undrunk. "Finish the tea; it ought to help." He paused a moment longer, and his fingertips brushed her shoulder, a wordless gesture of consolation. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said quietly, and swept from the room. She heard the door to her office close behind him.

_Your cat wanted to help you, desperately._

She set down her cup of tea and twisted her hands round the handkerchief again, fingers tracing over the simply embroidered _S.S. _in one corner of the square of linen.

_Trust the scarecrow man_.

"You did just enough, didn't you, Crooks," she said softly aloud, tears finally forming in her eyes anew. "You pestered him so much that you drew attention to me, you made him curious. And then you made him _care_." Her laugh was a little watery, but it was a laugh, nonetheless. "Interesting aptitude for manipulation, indeed. Had you been human, you might have been a Slytherin."

She finished her tea, drank a burning snifter of scotch to her loyal, deceased cat, and curled up beneath a blanket on her sofa before the fire, almost certain, despite her grief, that sleep would come soon.

* * *

><p>She was preparing to leave for the Great Hall for breakfast the next morning when a few short knocks sounded on her office door. "Just a moment," she called, finishing her braid hurriedly. Her eyes were still a bit bloodshot from all the crying the night before, and her concealer only lightened the shadows beneath them somewhat, but she looked no better or worse from her usual self, and that much was acceptable. With a sigh, she strode through her sitting room to her door, pulling it open.<p>

Harry Potter was on her doorstep, holding a napkin full of toast, a tray of food levitating behind him.

For a moment, she was speechless. Though her mouth opened, no sound came out. "Harry," she finally squeaked. "What are you doing here?"

He held up a hastily re-folded piece of parchment, a few short lines of vaguely familiar, spiky handwriting barely visible. "I got a late owl last night," he said gently. "From Snape. About Crookshanks. Hermione..."

She shook her head, her throat tightening, and he closed the distance between them to hug her, holding the toast carefully out of harm's way, one long arm folding around her as she buried her face in his shoulder and heaved a long sigh of relief.

"You didn't have to come all the way here," she said, voice muffled by his shirt. "It's Sunday, Ginny..."

"Ginny would have come, too, but she's not feeling fantastic. She sends her love."

"I'm all right, really," she said, though she made no move to release herself from his embrace.

She heard him sigh. His voice was heavy. "You're not. I know you're not. How could you be? You had that cat for twelve years."

She pulled back from him and forced a smile. "Perhaps I'm not all right. But I will be. He was old. Tired. He had a good life. He said as much." She stepped back, gesturing toward her sitting room. "Come in."

He nodded, and with a flick of his wand—which she now realized he held in the same hand as the toast—the tray of breakfast followed him in.

"I stopped at the kitchens," he said, by way of explanation, as she showed him into her quarters. "Thought you might not be up for the Great Hall."

She sat down on her sofa in relief. "Yes, a quiet morning in would be rather preferable."

She helped herself to a piece of toast from the stack. Harry did the same, and for a few moments, they ate in silence. She felt, though, in the way that she usually could, that he had something to say, something to ask, and he was working out the proper way to phrase it in his mind.

"Was it...he didn't suffer, much, did he?" he asked finally. "Snape didn't say much..."

She shook her head. "No," she replied. "He'd been lethargic for this past week, acting more lazy than usual, you know. I thought it might just be the cold, or that he was tired...he'd been quite active since we got here, all the mice, you know, and I thought he'd just worn himself out. Well. He was twenty-three, according to Minerva. Very old for a cat, an appropriate lifespan for a Kneazle."

"Twenty-three?" Harry returned, baffled. "You never would have guessed it, would you? He was an energetic thing."

She chuckled. "Yes. He was." She reached for a bowl of raspberries. "He was just...old. Once we knew there was nothing we could do, Severus suggested Dreamless Sleep, and he just...went on."

He was giving her an odd look of scrutiny. The real thing was coming now, she thought, the thing that he was trying to figure out how to ask.

"Hermione, the letter...Snape hasn't bothered to respond to _any _of my letters in the last few years, except with Howlers. He's returned every gift, refused every invitation. But he wrote me quite...civilly...last night. It was astonishing." He picked up the folded parchment on the coffee table and held it out to her. Curious, she opened it and read.

_Dear Mr. Potter,_

_I regret to inform you that Professor Granger's cat, Crookshanks, passed away this evening._

_If you or Mrs. Potter could spare some time on the morrow, I'm certain she would most appreciate your company._

_Regards,_

_S. Snape_

"Well," she said, stunned and a little touched, "that is quite civil, isn't it?"

When she turned to Harry again, one corner of his mouth was turned up in an amused, lopsided smile.

"What?" she asked, a little defensively.

"You're friends, aren't you? You and Snape." He took the letter back from her. "You took Crookshanks to him when you realized he was ill. He wrote me so that you might have some company today. You're _friends_. Bloody hell." He didn't sound displeased.

"Well," she said, not knowing what else to say. "Yes. Though I'm not sure you'd call it friendship, what we do. We bicker over the most recent journals and duel occasionally and sometimes we complain about our students over tea." _And he's sunk countless hours into helping me recover from the war, but you can't know that_.

"You were the key all along," Harry mused, folding up the letter again.

He had lost her. "Sorry?"

"I want him to be at the naming ceremony," Harry said, "for Albus Severus. And he'll come, if you ask him to go with you. Because he _likes _you." He sounded nearly gleeful. "I should have thought of it before! He had to get past his dislike of you eventually, especially without Ron and I around...you two are so alike..."

"Excuse me," she said indignantly. "I'm friends with Severus, yes, but there are a few key differences in our personalities!"

He smiled at her. "I didn't mean to offend you. I only meant...the two of you, you're both so brilliant, you know? He had to accept that you were a kindred spirit eventually."

She relented. "You're right, of course."

He was quiet another moment, and then he asked, "What's he like?"

So Hermione told him that Severus loved a good cup of coffee and wasn't to be asked to socialize before noon; that in terms of power, agility, and inventiveness, perhaps only Dumbledore and Voldemort had ever held a candle to the man, and that he might now be the greatest wizard alive; that he had a deep appreciation for good alcohol and rare books; that he knew more about Potions than she could ever hope to learn, and as far as Defence, no one understood it so well as he; that he had a sense of humour full of darkness, wit, and sarcasm; that he treated house-elves, and even Crookshanks, with kindness...

And Harry Potter smiled as he listened to his best friend describe the man she was in love with, even if she didn't know it yet herself.

* * *

><p>Severus knew who was knocking on his door at seven o'clock that evening. He couldn't have hoped to invite Harry Potter within fifty miles of this castle without understanding that he was also inviting the Boy Who Wouldn't Die to pester him endlessly. It had been some time since Potter had had the opportunity for a face-to-face assault; it was inevitable.<p>

He glanced at the clock, wishing that the brat had decided to come a little later. He might have used his patrol duties as an excuse to sidestep the encounter entirely, but that was two hours from the present, with nothing in between.

"I invited you to the castle, not to my doorstep, Potter," he said coldly as soon as he opened his door and confirmed that it was, indeed, the Boy Wonder.

The younger man held up a hand. "I'm not going to push gifts on you or ask you to socialize. I've given up on that. It's about Hermione. May I come in?"

"Is it urgent?"

Green eyes flashed, and for a moment, he saw Lily, hands on her hips, irritated with him for his obstinacy. "Rather," Potter replied, brushing past him into his office.

Irked, Severus shut the door behind him. "She was very attached to that cat; is she still...grieving?"

Potter turned to face him. "She just lost a creature she loved as much as she loves me or Ginny, and yet, she's happier than she's been in years." He paused; his eyes were dark, mouth tight with concern. "I know she isn't...well. She hasn't returned any of my owls this term, except to thank me for the birthday gift. She isn't writing to Ginny, either, and Ron won't tell us a thing, but he knows something about what's bothering her; he's a horrid liar. I want to know, Professor, if you'll tell me; is she all right?"

He considered the younger man for a long moment, the worry and fear in his face, worn prematurely.

"She has chosen not to confide in you," he said at last, his tone indifferent. "I would not jeopardize her privacy—her trust—to put you at ease."

A mingled expression of relief and annoyance crossed Potter's face.

"She thinks rather highly of you," he ventured.

Severus said nothing, though the way Potter scrutinized him put him ill at ease.

"At least tell me that she's better, here," he said, his eyes searching Severus's face. "That she's..." He trailed off.

"How long have you known that she was unwell?" Severus asked, his voice hard.

Guilt tripped across his features; he read like a book, Severus reflected, as he always had.

"A few years," Potter admitted. "Either it was some time before she couldn't hide it so well anymore, or we were unusually unobservant. We all reacted differently to the war, and...I'm sure I neglected to notice the signs. By the time I did...I didn't know how to help her. She'd distanced herself so much, from me, from Ginny, from Ron."

"So you make amends by sending her trinkets that don't help her in the slightest? Charming." His lip curled up in a sneer.

"It didn't help at all, then?"

"Magic is not powerful enough to fix her."

"But something can," Potter suggested. "And you seem to know."

His only answer was silence.

"Just tell me that you like her, and it'll put me at ease," the younger man said, exasperated. "I want to know that her faith is in the right person, and you know I can't tell. I can't read you. I can see the clues, I suppose—you wouldn't have written me if you didn't care, you wouldn't have put up with her grief about her cat if she didn't matter, you wouldn't bicker with her about Potions and be forced to patrol with her if she meant nothing to you—"

"I daresay you have your own answer, then, Mr. Potter." His voice was ice.

"I love Hermione like a sister," Potter returned heatedly, taking a step forward. "And I know her. I know that she cares too much about things that give her very little return, but she always sees it as just enough. I can't help her, I can't be in this castle with her, I can't make her eat and help her sleep and figure out what it is that's wrong, but you can. Or you could hurt her, very badly, and Hermione is the strongest person I know, but she won't be the same if the world keeps rejecting that heart of hers." He stared up at Severus; it was nearly a glare. "She trusts you. Do you understand? It's the highest compliment she could give. She hasn't trusted anyone in years. Please, if you can...if you would...do what you can for her."

After a long pause, Severus reached for the doorknob. "I believe we're finished here."

Potter straightened his glasses, sighed heavily, and made to depart.

"Oh, and, Mr. Potter...Professor Granger's parents." The younger man glanced up. "Where might one find them?"

Potter sighed again. "One wouldn't," he said, fastening his cloak.

"They passed?" Severus pressed.

An odd, pitying look crossed his face. "No," he said. "She hasn't mentioned it?"

"No. What befell them?"

"She Obliviated them, you know, before we went off to look for Horcruxes." He frowned deeply. "She gave them new identities, sent them to Australia, made them forget they had a daughter. She didn't want Death Eaters to find them, torture them for information, you know. And she thought she could find them, reverse the spell, when the war was done. She found them, but...she couldn't reverse the memory charm. She tried for months, and Ron finally had to convince her to give up, to come home. She hasn't mentioned them since. It broke her heart. She thought it was the most important bit of magic she would ever do, and she couldn't."

His heart wrenching uncomfortably, Severus gave a curt nod. "Your information is useful," he allowed. "Now, get off my doorstep."

Potter smiled sadly. "As you wish, Professor."

He returned to his sitting room, called for Winky to bring him a cup of coffee, and sifted through his notes, searching for a blank piece of parchment where he might write afresh. When the new information had been recorded, he considered it for long minutes until the words blurred before him and Potter's voice echoed in his mind instead.

_She hasn't trusted anyone in years_.

That much was obvious. She had shown no one the scar; the one other man who had sighted it had been allowed to assume it wasn't important, merely a relic of a torture scene they all wanted to forget. Her friends had seen the signs, but later, much later, than the suffering had begun. If any of them had resided in the castle with her during her belated seventh year, they might have noticed something amiss rather sooner. The scene in the library could not have been the only evidence of her impending breakdown.

Potter's wife had been with her, he realized belatedly; they would have been dorm-mates while Hermione sat her N.E.W.T.s, perhaps. What had she seen, and not questioned? Had she attempted to reach Hermione, with no result?

His coffee had grown cold by the time a quieter knock sounded on his door. The clock over his mantle read five to nine; she was always five minutes early, no more, no less. He got to his feet, removed his cloak from the coat rack, and slid his wand up his sleeve.

When he opened the door to join her, she smiled. It was a small smile, and a little strained, but it reached her eyes. They weren't so bloodshot as the night before, and he saw what Potter had seen: in spite of the death of her beloved familiar, she was not so unhappy.

_I want to know that her faith is in the right person._

"Ready?" she asked, her amber eyes flicking to his.

For a moment, he felt the wave of her emotions—grief, sadness, melancholy, sorrow, and a strange acceptance, an odd hope—and knew that Potter had not exaggerated. She reached out to him, not conscious of it, perhaps, but her mind brushed his with that glance, and the trust was implicit, obvious, thoughtless.

"We'll start with the Astronomy Tower," he returned, raising the wards on his quarters.

A brief look of concern crossed her features. "Harry didn't bother you, did he?" she asked, worried. "He said he was going straight home, but I know him..."

"Obviously." He beckoned her forward. "Most refreshingly, he wasn't intent on inviting me to a gala or gifting me quills."

She laughed. "What on Earth could he have wanted with you, then?" Her voice was teasing.

For a moment, he considered telling her it was nothing, that Potter had just wanted to chat over tea, but the voice of the Boy Who Wouldn't Die spoke up again, reminding him.

_She trusts you._

"He is worried about your health," he said, "and hoped that I might shed light on it."

He felt her eyes on him, suddenly frightened, worried that he had given away her secrets.

"I told him nothing," he continued. "If you wish to inform him on your well-being, you'll have to do it yourself, I'm afraid."

The relief in her was tangible. She reached out to touch his arm, gazing at him with gratitude.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "I'm not ready to tell them yet."

_You could hurt her, very badly_.

_Indeed_, Severus thought heavily, as the woman at his side lit her wand and led the way. _Indeed._

* * *

><p><span>AUTHOR'S NOTE<span>: Merry Christmas, lovelies! Reviews make me happy. Just sayin'. (: Also, for those of you who cried during chapter thirteen, you're not alone-I cried while writing it. I'm clearly a little attached to this piece. Haha.


	15. Debt

FIFTEEN

_Debt_

The first week without Crookshanks was difficult for Hermione. It was lonely in her quarters without him curled up on the hearth, stretching and purring and occasionally joining her at her armchair or desk. Too frequently, she glanced up, expecting him to be complaining for food by this late hour, only to remember that he would never complain at her for food again. It was unaccountably miserable.

"Maybe you ought to get another cat," Neville suggested one lunch when Severus wasn't present; there had been a mess in of his earlier Defence classes, and he was busy sorting out his classroom, which was now inexplicably swamp-like.

"It's too soon," she sighed, pushing her food around her plate with her fork. "Maybe in a few months, but right now...it would just be odd. I don't think I'd be entirely fair to a new cat."

She wasn't allowed to feel too lonely, though. When she glanced up looking for Crookshanks and didn't find him, she usually found Severus instead.

It started early in the week, after the first meal she missed, exhausted from the strain of merely getting through the day's classes without allowing her grief to affect her teaching; she couldn't bear the thought of facing the Great Hall, the sympathetic looks of her fellow professors, the fussing and attention. It had been five-thirty when the knock sounded at her door, and when her lethargy proved too deep to allow her to rise and answer it, Severus had dismantled her wards and invited himself in. He brought with him a tray of food, enough for the two of them.

"You aren't going to starve just because your cat is dead," he said matter-of-factly, and they ate in companionable, peaceful quiet. He spent the rest of the evening in her quarters, each marking papers, complaining occasionally about students who were particularly inept, and less frequently cross-examining a student who showed aptitude in one of their subjects (only one seemed superior in both).

He was as irascible as ever over breakfast, and hardly better over lunch, but Severus's presence at Hermione's elbow served to soothe her more often than not. Patrolling for long hours of the night in his company was enjoyable; their discussions were long, intelligent, and complex, distracting her from her lingering melancholy. Their silences, too, were comfortable. She wouldn't have believed for a second that Severus Snape could be a balm for grief, but perhaps she had underestimated him.

That Friday evening, at nine o'clock, he met her knock at the door of his office and didn't invite her inside. "We won't be attempting an Occlumency lesson tonight," he told her, warding and locking his quarters. "A duel would do you more good."

She smiled weakly. "I don't really think I stand much of a chance, Severus."

His black eyes swept over her; it seemed a moment of critical appraisal, and for some reason, she felt it turn her cheeks pink. She looked away from his gaze.

"You would be surprised," he said softly, gesturing forward. "Grief is a fickle thing."

They strode in silence up the many staircases of the castle, ending at last outside the Room of Requirement. It took only a moment to gain access, and then Severus held the door wide for her as she slipped inside.

It looked much the same as it had the last time they had been here: the slight bounce of a Cushioning Charm on the floor, the place bursting with books, and what appeared to be a medical station in one corner; perhaps she hadn't noticed that the last time, or perhaps it had just appeared now. Frowning, she turned to Severus to ask if he planned on mortally wounded her, and lost her train of thought as she caught sight of him again.

Another thing hadn't changed since the last time they stood in this room: she was still assuredly, nonsensically attracted to the man. If anything, his appeal had only grown more powerful in the last month. She was mesmerized by the intent look on his face as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, the faded tattoo momentarily coming into view on his forearm; she was again fascinated by the shape of him, all angles; she was once more startlingly enthralled by his unconventional appeal.

Before he could catch her looking—for his gaze was on the upswing—her eyes fell to her own shirtsleeves and she hurriedly rolled them up, baring the scar on her forearm. It would give her greater mobility, and she no longer had any secrets from this man.

When she looked up again, hoping her blush was under control, he was poised, at the ready. He couldn't have looked any different, though, than the burning man Hermione had seen in his eyes when they last stood in this room, preparing to duel. He wasn't thrashing in his own pain, consumed by his own thoughts, or focused inward at all. He was relaxed—at the ready, yes, but relaxed—and his attention was directed outward, at her. She would have bet everything she owned that he hadn't seen her, not a bit, at the beginning of the last duel, but now...

Now, his focus was on her. Her stomach twisted a little at the realization.

"Remember," he told her as she lifted her wand, "instinct. You truly don't stand a chance otherwise." The curl at the corner of his lip was more of a smirk than a sneer, a Slytherin attempt to tease rather than injure. Her heart thudded against her ribcage, fast and hard.

She cast her first curse and was off running as he returned the volley, driving thoughts of her attraction to this man and what _that _meant from her mind.

He had been right. The power of her grief had shut down the constant thought processes which put her at such a disadvantage to him in battle; she acted purely on instinct, one moment to the next, and it was an elegant dance, the game of dodging and firing, one that she was a participant in and understood fully.

After a few moments, she was sweating, and she could see the glisten of perspiration on his forehead as well; he'd been forced to abandon his standstill tactics in the living fury of her attacks, and was on the move, still maintaining the shield around his person. It cost him effort to move with it, she realized; it was a heavy thing to maintain, and if she could just shatter it—

She popped up from behind one of the natural barriers she'd conjured—a large overturned statue of some sort—and threw the full force of her magic into the next curse, intentionally aiming low, hoping that he wouldn't move fast enough to block it—

A horrible, dull _crunch _resounded through the room as the spider-web of magic—his previously invisible shield—flickered with green light and then shattered to the floor. Taking advantage of the moment, she fired a Reductor Curse at the mantle, thoroughly blowing it apart and showering Severus with the debris. She heard him curse, but in the next instant—an instant in which she was distracted by her glee at any progress at all—the debris of the fireplace was blown outward, leaving a battered Severus at the epicentre. She ducked, but still caught blows from the fragmented pieces of marble and metal, and then the fury of his magic was on her, and she was running again.

The next time she paused long enough to take cover and subsequently popped up from behind one of her barriers, his Stunner hit her with full force in the chest, and she had a dim instant to appreciate the Cushioning Charm in effect on the floor before she fainted.

* * *

><p>Severus allowed himself the time to curse, once, and violently. It was a sound filled not just with disgust, but appreciation; she had done remarkably better in this battle than she had the last, and he'd been most impressed at her ability to shatter his shield. He was bleeding, shirt ripped open at the shoulder, a rough gash on his forearm where debris from the mantle had knocked into him—another clever idea of hers, if only she had taken advantage of that moment of distraction, rather than concentrating on her glee at managing to give him pause—and he was certain that a lump had been raised on the back of his head.<p>

It was something. And it wasn't a wonder that she had survived the Department of Mysteries, the battle at the Astronomy Tower, and all the Death Eaters she had encountered since. He hadn't guessed at the depth of her magic since her return to the castle, but he suspected it went even deeper than this, than the the sheer power she'd gathered to break the protective magic around him. It hadn't manifested in true capacity, not in their first accidental duel or in their planned second, but perhaps...perhaps she was beginning to heal, and her control of her power was beginning to solidify again.

He crossed the room to where she lay, unconscious, felled by a lucky Stunner. Her wild hair had tumbled out of its bun, and spilled around her on the floor, rich and brown and lovely, and if he wasn't mistaken, she had put on a bit of weight thanks to his constant insistence that she eat, her skin had a healthier glow about it, the shadows under her eyes looked a little lighter, and he wondered when it had all gotten so much more complicated than he had intended it to be.

He had just intended to help her, he mused, kneeling carefully at her side. He had intended to reach a hand out to a colleague, pull her up from the darkness she'd lost herself in, and he believed he was beginning to succeed at that much, yes, but something else entirely was happening here. She wasn't just a colleague any more. She was a friend, and at times, he wondered if there was more to it than that. Severus Snape was inexperienced with women, that much was true, at least with courting them, for what woman would ever look at his visage and see beauty there? It was a dance that he had never taken part in, not even once the war had ended and entreaties from enthralled females poured in from all over the countryside, all over the world. His status as a dark hero—his lip curled at the thought—would have allowed them to overlook his surliness and ugliness for a while, he believed, but the appeal had, by now, disappeared. And he had been so certain that he would remain alone, forever, in this solitary existence, not quite living, just existing, without even his obsession for Lily Potter to accompany him, for that had long since faded.

Here she was, though, this girl, this former student, who had saved his life and drained her considerable well of power to do it, who had shouldered into his quiet, bitter existence, and he hadn't tried, really tried, to push her out. He'd made, at best, half-hearted attempts, and then he'd invited her in with food and companionship and a duelling partner and a promise to do his best to help her get well again. And so she smiled when she saw him in the corridors, she chuckled when he said anything particularly dry or sarcastic, she argued passionately over dinner about the politics of the day or the obscure text of the moment, and so far as he could tell, she treated no one else quite like she treated him, with all the warmth and regard she seemed capable of at the moment. Longbottom caught some of it, and perhaps Potter did, too, but it was there in her eyes whenever she looked at him, a sort of brightness than no one had ever turned his way before.

He shook himself from his reverie, lifted his wand, and murmured, "_Enervate_."

Her eyes fluttered open, for a moment, the brown orbs glazed and slightly muddled; but she appeared to focus, finally, on his face, and she smiled, that brightness turning up again.

His heart was beating uncomfortably in his chest. No, no one had ever looked at him quite that way before. With admiration—with respect—with fear—with approval—but never the way she looked at him, as if she was happy to see him, even after he'd knocked her out with a Stunner to the chest. But his discomfort wasn't due to that; no, it was due to the fact that he welcomed that look.

"I was better that time, wasn't I, unless you were holding back?" she asked, as he rose to his feet and reached a hand down to pull her up. She didn't hesitate; she took the proffered hand and he helped haul her to her feet. "And I know, I was so distracted by my excitement that I distracted you that I didn't take advantage—oh, Severus, you're bleeding."

He glanced down; in the grip of his thoughts, he'd quite forgotten about his injuries.

"Yes," he said dryly. "Causing the fireplace to explode _was _a rather clever diversion."

She turned his palm face-up, cradling his hand and wrist in her own, and for a moment, he remembered that first accidental duel, how appalled he had been at her touch, how disgusted he had felt with her eyes on the faded Dark Mark. He had been so certain in that moment that she pitied him and feared him, so sure that her kindness in healing him had been that blanket Gryffindor sense of doing right no matter how unappealing, that she had to grit her teeth to handle him, a charity case, tainted, dangerous.

She lifted her wand, but he interrupted her swiftly. "Don't—surely you feel how much you expended to destroy my shield?"

She looked up at him quizzically. "A...a bit, yes, now that you mention it."

"No magic for the next hour." He nodded to the corner, pulling his hand from hers to cross to it, though the loss of warmth made his stomach sink in disappointment. "I had the presence of mind to request some basic health supplies this time; they ought to suffice."

She followed him, but when he reached for a bowl and the tap himself, she gently stopped him, hand on his arm. "It'll be easier if you let me," she said, pushing him down into one of the chairs there. She pulled up her own, filled a shallow bowl with water, picked up a cloth, and sat down across from him, so close that her knees brushed his.

She was gentle. Fierce in battle, but nothing but soft and tender when it came to cleaning the wound on his forearm. His eyes wandered to her rolled-up shirtsleeves, the scar—_Mudblood—_standing out on her light skin. She didn't follow his gaze; her eyes were on the faded tattoo, the skull and snake, the ink and magic sunk into his skin, coming into view as she cleaned away the blood.

"Is it permanent?" she asked quietly.

He was silent for a moment, considering how to answer her.

"If it bothers you, you needn't tell me," she added quickly. "I was only—"

"Curious," he finished for her, and her lips twitched in a smile of relief when his voice betrayed no anger. "Yes, it's permanent. It's the sort of spot that doesn't come off."

She shook her head. "That isn't true."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "You're speaking in metaphors."

"So are you. And I think you're wrong." Her fingers brushed a salve over the clean wound, smearing and distorting the outline of the tattoo. "You've done too much good—"

"Rest assured that it was not for the right reasons," he interrupted. "You know the story. It wasn't my conscience that drove me to act as a double-agent for the better part of twenty years. It was my obsession with a dead woman, a girl who hadn't even spoken to me since we were sixteen. It was atonement, not for the wrongs that I did to others; those wrongs didn't matter. The only things I atoned for were the wrongs I did to her."

"And in the process, you saved lives," she said sharply. "Tell me truly that you didn't care who lived or died, and I will believe that it's the sort of spot that doesn't come off."

He had no argument for that, so he was silent as she finished applying the salve. "The Dark Arts never let you go, Hermione," he said finally.

She glanced up. "What does _that _mean?"

"It means that there is a reason that the Dark Lord was as powerful as he was, that I am as powerful as I am. Have you ever heard of a particularly powerful wizard without knowing that he had journeyed beyond the boundaries of sane magic?"

Her mouth opened to argue, to contradict him, but it just as quickly closed. "Even Dumbledore," she said quietly.

"Even Dumbledore," he agreed. "It's why he never allowed himself to answer the call of the Prime Minister position; they warp you forever. One brush, and there's a taint in your blood, a siren's song in your ears, and you will never forget the pull of that power, because once, you made an agreement: your sanity for the privileged use of that darkness. You might want to renege on that agreement, but the Dark Arts pay no heed. You will have a vast well of power, and use it as you see fit, but they will always tempt you, and it is all too easy to fall back into bad habits."

She considered this for a moment, frowning thoughtfully at the Dark Mark, and then shifted forward to the edge of her seat. Her knees were now between his; the closeness made him uneasy, and yet, he didn't want her to put distance between them. With nimble fingers, she slipped the first few buttons of his shirt out of their holes, and then folded the fabric back over his shoulder, baring the wound that a corner of the mantle had cut open.

He looked away from her—her closeness, her touch, her scent, like warm vanilla and baking apples, was too much to endure all at once—and felt her gaze go to his neck, the scars left there by Nagini. Her fingers reached out and brushed them, feather-light.

"It doesn't hurt, does it?" she asked in a low voice. "I was never sure if..."

"You did the thing right," he said, his voice flat. He felt her eyes dart to his face and then away again; she started to clean the blood from the wound on his shoulder. "I'm curious," he continued, attempting to brook a more pleasant tone, "why you did it."

"I told you," she said, and there was tension in her voice now. "I always trusted you."

"Foolish."

"No," she said firmly, pressing the cold cloth to the gash a little harder than necessary. "No, it wasn't. Dumbledore was a manipulative old codger, but he had the right of it, and he trusted you. And I trusted Dumbledore—more than Harry ever did, even. Harry had his doubts, but I was always so sure, so sure that Dumbledore had a plan, that we would all be all right...and he trusted you." She dipped the cloth back into the water. "And so did I. So I cast a stasis spell, to keep you living while we dealt with more pressing issues, and returned the instant I had a moment. I knew you would never forgive me, you know." He turned to look at her; they were so close that he could see every long eyelash, the detail of the different shades of brown in her sad eyes. "I knew that the only way I would ever achieve your approval was to let you die, but for once, I wanted something more than I wanted that nod of recognition."

"Approval?" He smirked. "You sought _my _approval? You had the approval of every other professor in this castle—what did you need mine for?"

"That's just it," she said softly, picking up the salve. "Yours was not so freely given, couldn't be won by a simple recitation of the text you'd assigned. If you knew," and here, she laughed, "if you knew how much more time I devoted to Potions than to any other subject—seeking, just once, a grade of true excellence from you, a single _word _of acknowledgement scrawled in the tiniest print—your approval was more valuable than the rest combined, because I would work forever to achieve it, and still never find myself worthy."

"Undoubtedly, those extra hours gave you some aid in saving my life," he said, finding the whole thing very ironic. "And now I'm in your debt, which ought to reflect, I suppose, the highest sort of approval."

She went very still very suddenly; a flash of anger touched her features as she looked at him. "Is that what this is about?" she asked, her voice slightly heated. "Helping me, tolerating me, trying to make me well again—are you just attempting to repay the life debt?"

"There is no life debt," he interrupted, before she could talk her way into hysterics. "It was a turn of phrase, Hermione, nothing more."

She frowned, effectively stopped in her tracks. "What? There has to be a life debt. There always is. There's no way around it, though I _looked_, mind you, I researched—I wanted to dispel it as soon as I could—"

"There is an exception," he said roughly. "It's simply not scientific enough to be named in any academic volume. If you had no desire at all to reap the benefits of saving my life—for the entire three days that you worked to bring me back to health—then you voided the debt. You would have had power over me that neither the Dark Lord nor Dumbledore ever fully achieved: I would not have been allowed to defy you, not for anything, but your utter selflessness in the act of resurrecting me kept the magic from being activated. I tested it almost immediately and found that the bond didn't exist. For years, I wondered why the girl I had tormented throughout her school days had deigned to save my life without even the gratification of the debt that I owed her..."

Her eyes were sad again. "Because I wanted you to live," she said quietly. "I wanted you to have the _chance _to live, your own life, after all I suspected that you had done for us. I didn't believe for a second that you would use that chance to your full advantage, but I still wanted to give you the opportunity. The option. You don't get any of those when you're dead."

She got to her feet, a peculiar look of remarkable sorrow on her features, and turned as though to go, but he reached out and caught her hand.

"I'm not ungrateful," he said quietly.

She sighed. "I know. Death by giant pet snake has never appealed to you."

"No. What I meant..." He hesitated for an instant. "Thank you. For the opportunity."

The corner of her mouth curved up in a smile. "When I see you happy to be alive, Severus Snape, that will be thanks enough."

She gently pulled her hand from his and left the room, allowing the door to fall shut softly behind her, and he sat still for some time, the memory of her racing pulse beneath his fingertips leaving him paralysed.


	16. Baiting

SIXTEEN

_Baiting_

She had worn a dark red dress at the first Victory Day Ball.

Severus watched her in the memory. She was dancing with Ron Weasley, laughing, her hair barely contained by the many pins holding the curls in place. They glinted a burnished gold wherever they caught the light. She was the vision of Gryffindor, a true lioness in scarlet and gold, her dark amber eyes sparkling, and she must have used glamours to cover her scars, for the dress was strapless and left her arms quite bare.

His younger self watched her from the corner, too, Firewhisky in hand, scowling to scare off any who dared approach.

She seemed quite well here, he thought. She had a little more weight to her—her dress was tight enough to leave little to the imagination in the way of her curves—and if there were shadows under her eyes, they had been concealed. He glanced at his younger self and wondered how he had not seen her, how he had glared at her in loathing for the entire evening without the thought once crossing his mind that she was quite beautiful.

Had he truly been so furious with her for saving his life? That rage had faded over time, but it had still burned strong here; he could see it in his own black eyes, cutting her down with his glare, though she was oblivious and took no notice. When had he stopped hating her? And when had careful neutrality turned into affection?

She finally caught the eye of a five-years-younger Severus Snape, and her cheeks flushed when she realized how he was looking at her. The Hermione he was more familiar with suddenly shone through, just for a moment: embarrassed, humiliated, desperately unhappy. Then her features were smooth again, and she didn't look toward the corner where he sat again.

He left the Pensieve and strode to his armchair, his thoughts full of her.

She had improved, bit by bit, over the last several weeks. She was nothing close to full health, of course, but he couldn't help but dread the day that she did fully recover, when she was able to stand on her own. She wouldn't need him then, not a bit. Would she still drop by seeking company, once she was sleeping properly? Would she still argue with him over dinner, when her flashbacks of war faded to simple memories, quiet and harmless? Would she still look at him with that brightness in her eyes, turned up so that they sparkled, or would she wonder what she had been thinking, to be spending all her time with a half-dead man, one who had born a grudge against her for years for saving his life, and for longer than that for simply being herself?

It had been two weeks since they had duelled in the Room of Requirement, since she had cleaned his wounds and sat too close to him and asked him to be happy.

Two weeks since he had realized that he was in love with a woman twenty years his junior, a former student, a Gryffindor, the best friend of the Boy Wonder, and his only friend in the world.

In love with Hermione Granger.

It was a curious thing indeed, love. Loving Lily had only ever brought him heartache, and Hermione came with her fair share, of course—for she wasn't his, and he was certain that she never would be, and he wasn't certain that he _did_ want her to be, even given the opportunity—but it was simpler, with her, to just be quietly pleased that she existed. It was easier to watch her improve, bit by bit, and be silently happy that she was healing, that he was _helping _her heal, even though it was possible that once she was well, he would lose her.

He had said more words in conversation to her in the mere two months she had lived in this castle than he had said to anyone in years; he had entertained her in this room more often than any other visitors combined; he had consoled her when she realized how ill she was; he had helped her bury her cat; he had gotten used to her presence in his life, and he was loathe for that to change.

Just as he went to reach for his bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhisky—it was late on Saturday, after all, and there was little else to do but drink and muse—there was a soft knock at his office door. Tucking away his thoughts, he rose from his armchair, wincing when his knee twinged under his weight, and went to answer the summons.

Hermione stood on his threshold, a chess set tucked under her arm and a bottle of wine in hand. She smiled—a little shyly—as she looked up at him. The wariness she had once regarded him with was gone. There was still a hint of anxiety, to be sure, a bit of nervousness, but it was nothing like the fear he had once seen in her face whenever she met his eyes. Instead, there was the soft brush of her consciousness, warm and peaceful. She had slept well the night before; she had eaten properly today; her mood was easy, calm, vaguely content. He wondered if she knew that she was sharing all that information with him when she looked at him. It twisted him to know how deeply and intuitively she trusted him, even if she didn't know it herself.

He wasn't to be trusted. Didn't she know that?

_Trust the scarecrow man_.

That damn cat had no idea what it was on about.

"Fancy a game?" She held up the bottle of wine invitingly. "I'm sure you'll murder me, of course, I was never good at it, but I thought you might enjoy it. Ron always did crush me when we played."

He inclined his head politely and stepped back to allow her in. "I never imagined that the Ginger Menace could best you at anything."

She laughed at his remark and slipped past him toward the sitting room. "It was the only thing," she called over her shoulder as he shut the door. "And he was brilliant at it. It always puzzled me." She levitated one of his coffee tables to the space between the two armchairs. Why had he ever had two? he wondered as he joined her beside the fire, bringing two goblets with him. He had never truly had company before her. "I was the logical one," she continued, handing the bottle of wine to him when he silently held out a hand for it. "I was the one who solved your Potions challenge first year. I ought to be good at chess. But I'm astonishingly terrible."

He frowned as he poured her a goblet of wine and handed it over. "Ah. Yes. I'd forgotten. Dumbledore did tell me about that. He was positively tickled."

She smirked up at him and overturned the box of chess pieces, allowing them to scramble to assemble themselves. "Were you embarrassed?"

"You can't imagine," he said darkly. "I was the second-to-last defence for the Stone, and I was bested by an eleven-year-old."

"Twelve," she corrected, and smiled when he glared at her.

"There's hardly a difference." He seated himself in his armchair, and she perched at the edge of her own, sipping at her wine.

"If it's any consolation, I'm the brightest witch of my generation," she said cheerily, avoiding his gaze when it turned toward her again, darkening.

"You slept well last night?" he asked as she made her first move: a pawn, to make room for her bishop to move out on the next turn.

She paused in the act of picking up her goblet again, looking up at him. "How did you know?"

"You're always more cheerful when you've slept properly," he murmured, and asked his knight to move forward, watching it rather than the surprised look on her face.

"You ought to try it some time," she shot back, eyes full of mirth.

"My disposition is rather ingrained, I fear. I'm an old man." He leaned back with his goblet, sipping while she contemplated her next move.

"It's all right. It's one of the reasons I like you so much, I reckon."

He raised an eyebrow as her bishop darted out of hiding.

She blushed, but didn't back down. "Everyone else is the image of restraint," she said bracingly. "D'you know what I mean? Polite, considerate. You're a breath of fresh air, the way you comment on things."

"You are describing a trait that has so far endeared no one to me," he said dryly. "Forgive me if I don't believe you. Pawn to H4."

She frowned slightly as she looked at him, and he felt the wave of her consciousness again—determination, earnest feeling. He looked away, back to the board, his discomfort with the accidental invasion of her mind like the taste of metal on his tongue.

"Knight to F6," she said, still frowning. "I don't need your permission to like you, you know."

He glanced up at that, mouth beginning to tug down in a scowl.

"You can frown at me all you like, but it's true," she argued, leaning forward, wine in hand. It was a dark red, and it had stained her pink lips, smudging them with colour. "You're free to dislike yourself all you want, but you've got no control over how everyone else feels about you."

"Touching," he said, lip beginning to curl in a smirk. "Castle to H3."

She smiled now. "You think I'm joking."

"Hermione..."

"I'll prove you wrong," she said cheerily, brown eyes observing him over her goblet. She drank deeply and set it back on the table, turning it so it was aligned in the corner just so. "I've got time, and no doubts about which one of us is more stubborn."

They played in silence for a few more minutes. "Checkmate," he said finally, and her king threw down his crown.

She sighed heavily as the pieces began to repair themselves and scramble back to their starting positions. "I told you I'm terrible at this game." Her eyes watched her bishop and knight get in a tussle on their way back to their spaces, and smiled. "The Masquerade Ball is next week," she commented.

"Yes," he said repressively.

She looked up. "I quite agree; it's a terrible idea."

"You realize we're to patrol that night, too," he pointed out darkly. "Can you imagine the number of snogging couples we'll have to reprimand?"

She winced. "Can I? Yes. Do I want to? No. Pawn to H5. We might be doing the girls a favour, though. Adolescent male fumblings are rarely the most enjoyable sort."

He raised an eyebrow. "Do tell, Granger. What adolescent male suffered the spurn of your distaste?"

She instantly reddened. "Certainly not. I'd have to be a good deal drunker than this to divulge that information. Wine won't do it."

"I have Firewhisky," he supplied helpfully, gesturing toward his liquor cabinet.

She made a face. "Not my favourite."

"Scotch?"

She wrinkled her nose.

"Gin?"

She looked at him dubiously. "Severus, are you an alcoholic?"

He barked a laugh, getting to his feet. "Would you be surprised?"

"Yes," she said, and he saw the spark of truth in her eyes. "You have a plethora of self-control." She glanced at the liquor cabinet. "I couldn't get a gin and tonic, by any chance?"

"Do you have a preferred ratio?"

"One to one. With lime. If it's not too much trouble," she added quickly at his glance.

The ice chattered in the glass as he poured the alcohol over it, and filled a snifter with Firewhisky for himself.

"You know, I actually don't think it'll be so bad," she commented as he returned to the table.

"What?" he said absentmindedly.

"The ball."

He paused in the act of handing her the drink and raised an eyebrow. "You clearly don't need this."

She smiled, reached out to wrap her fingers around the glass, her skin softly brushing his.

"It might surprise you," she said.

"I can at least count on your company, I presume?"

Her smirk was truly admirable. "If you can find me."

* * *

><p>Hermione smoothed the contours of her gown one last time. She had filled out just enough in the last month for it to fit well without making her look emaciated. She didn't anymore, really, she realized, leaning into the mirror to inspect her smoky eye shadow one last time. She fitted the mask over her face, taking care not to muss the curls gathered away from the nape of her neck. She scarcely recognized herself, done up so well and with such an unusual dress. Not for the first time, she wondered whether or not Severus would recognize her. There weren't even any scars to distinguish her; the ones that were visible by the skin left bare by the strapless gown were covered with faultless glamours.<p>

"I doubt it," she murmured, with a funny smile that didn't suit the look she had put together for herself tonight.

Heels sensibly concealed beneath the hem of her gown, she checked to be sure that her wand was concealed near her ankle—an insensible place, but the only real option in this dress—and then headed for the door of her office, closing it quietly behind her.

"Hermione?"

She turned to see Neville wandering past in classic dress robes; his only attempt at disguise was a simple black mask.

"Neville," she greeted. "Why aren't you upstairs?"

"I'm patrolling, first half of the ball. Look at you!" He grinned. "Trying to impress anyone?"

"I'm on duty," she said sternly, trying to fight the blush creeping up her neck. "There's no one to impress."

He shrugged, half a smile still on his face. "You never know. I'll catch you for a dance later?"

"If you promise not to step on my feet," Hermione retorted.

He shook his head ruefully. "Snape's really rubbing off on you. See you up there. And watch out for drunken firsties, I just overheard some fifth-years talking about spiking the punch." He turned the corner, wand loosely in his grip, and disappeared to a lower level of the dungeons.

She climbed the steps toward the Great Hall quietly, carefully holding her gown out of reach of her heels. Students were streaming into the cleared space, where music was already playing; the scent of pumpkin pie, bread and roasting meat drifted from the hall.

It didn't take much to spot Severus; who else would be lurking in a corner, a towering pillar of black, looking distinctly nettled about wearing a mask and being forced to babysit students? She quickly turned away, though, and set her sights on McGonagall, who was hovering near the drinks table.

"The punch is spiked," Hermione announced in an undertone.

"Yes, I thought as much," the Headmistress murmured, and then glanced back to check the identity of her colleague. "Hermione?"

"At your service," she said lightly, eyes scanning the crowd. "This was not a good idea, Minerva."

"Oh, teenagers will be teenagers. It isn't the end of the world. Besides, you look lovely." Her blue eyes eyed Hermione's mask and gown with approval. "Perhaps you can entice Severus out of his corner?"

Hermione laughed. "Oh, no, I'll stay clear. He's in a foul mood. This was not a good idea," she emphasized.

"We'll see," Minerva said absent-mindedly, performing a series of wand movements to remove the alcohol from the punch.

Hermione stayed in motion, keeping an eye on the dancing couples and the teenagers occasionally sneaking out of the Great Hall. She avoided his corner, and attempted to play down the mental chatter going on in her skull. She wished she could tell herself there was no reason to be nervous—that she wasn't, for some reason, anxious about approaching him, or about him identifying her, but she was. At the same time, though, she felt impatient, jittery, as if she was waiting. Waiting for him to see her, to remark on her somehow. The anxiety was still going strong after an hour, and still, he didn't budge from his corner, and still, she did not attempt to approach him.

"And you said you weren't trying to impress anyone."

She started and turned; Neville was at her elbow, smiling gently. "What?" she said blankly.

"Come on, Hermione. You've been circling the Great Hall for five minutes—probably longer—but not going within fifteen feet of him. I know that you're on fine terms. There's only one conclusion."

"Stop. We had a row," she lied. "I'm avoiding him."

Neville laughed. "I don't think you've ever sounded less convincing in your life. You're the least likely person in this room to have a row with Severus Snape. Come on." He tugged at her elbow. "One dance, you can tell me about it."

Reluctantly, she allowed him to lead her out to the floor. "How's patrolling looking?"

"Don't change the subject." His eyes narrowed behind his mask. "Seriously, Hermione. Tell me what's going on."

"It's not that simple."

"It looks simple from where I'm standing. You like him."

"Yes," she said, too flatly. "We're friends."

"Friends," he said dubiously. "And that's all? Then why don't you go lurk in the corner with him, have a slice of pie, and be snarky and sarcastic and argue about cauldron bottoms the rest of the evening?"

She bit her lip.

"Can you just…admit it?" he asked in a strained voice.

"Admit _what_, exactly?"

"That you're in love with him."

Her pulse soared; she could feel it thudding, too hard and too rapidly, against her ribs.

"Come on," he said, more gently, squeezing her hand as they turned. "There's nothing wrong with it. _No one _has a problem with it. The entire staff is waiting with their breath held for it to happen. And it's not as if he's the most expressive bloke, but he's been more animated with you than…well, anyone. You know he must feel the same."

She blinked, looking away from Neville's determined gaze. "It's not that simple," she repeated softly.

Neville let out a frustrated sigh. "With people as stubborn and complicated as you, it wouldn't be," he grouched. The song trailed off with a few lingering notes. "But it should be, you know."

"Excuse me, Mr. Longbottom," a deep voice interrupted from just over Hermione's shoulder. Neville instantly dropped Hermione's hand and put a foot between them for good measure. "Professor Granger? A dance?"

Neville smiled at her. "I've got to get back to my post, anyway. Professor. Hermione." He nodded to them both, and vanished into the crowd.

She turned to see him, towering over her. She hadn't looked at him quite closely enough in her haste to avoid him; he was not his typical towering pillar of black. There was silver thread embroidering his dress robes, dark green buttons with a similar silver thread standing out against the white of his shirt; the mask was simply black, similar to hers. And while she absorbed him, he absorbed her, his dark eyes taking her in.

"It's not much," she said automatically, still feeling the impulse to get ahead of his disdain with self-deprecation. "I just liked the colour. I'm so tired of red."

He reached out to take her hand, the other settling into the re-appearing curve of her waist as the band struck up a slow tune. "You look beautiful," he said quietly, his voice sincere.

She smiled up at him, a blush creeping up her neck. "You clean up very well yourself, Severus Snape."

The tune was slow. To her surprise, he danced well. "Too many dinner parties with the Malfoys," he said offhandedly, as he lifted her arm above her head and allowed her to twirl. He might have heard her thoughts. "Narcissa once staged the most absurdly elaborate get-togethers."

She chuckled. "It must have been quite nice."

"No. It led to me being in high demand all evening, with increasingly terrible partners." If he were a different sort of man, Severus might have cringed; instead, his black eyes were full of dark mirth. "Thankfully, those days are long over."

For a moment, they were silent. He guided her with ease; he was easily the best dance partner she'd ever had. It was disconcerting, though, to look too long up into those black eyes, so she focused instead on his shoulder while he continued to observe her without the slightest hint of discomfort.

"Glamours?" he asked, his voice almost too low to hear.

"Glamours," she agreed. "I can't exactly flaunt certain scars, and I've never been one to be buttoned to the wrists."

It was hard to converse on a crowded dance floor; it was hard to retain her focus with his hand gently curled around the curve of her waist. She felt distracted, disconcerted, off-balance, with his calm black gaze still regarding her, almost appraising her. And then, unbelievably, he flinched.

"What?" she asked automatically.

"Minerva," he said, glaring over the top of her head as they revolved. "Her glee outstrips any I ever felt from Albus. It's utterly sickening."

"Glee?" she repeated. "Dare I ask?"

Without a word, Severus gently twirled her to the side for a clear view. Minerva was whispering furiously in Pomona Sprout's ear, and both women were smiling far too brightly, their eyes fixed on the unlikely couple.

Hermione didn't know what possessed her to do it. She hadn't had a drop to drink that night, though she could foresee a need for it later. Perhaps it was lingering Gryffindor brashness that led her to lean up just enough to whisper in her partner's ear. "Let's have some fun with them, then," she said softly. "They'll be rather…upset…when everything appears as it was in the morning, won't they?"

His voice was grim, but strained with disguised mirth, as he spoke in her ear in turn. His deep voice sent shivers down her spine as his palm flattened against her back, closing the gap between them. "I have been a terrible influence on you," he murmured, a streak of pride in his voice.

* * *

><p><span>AUTHOR'S NOTE<span>: I know, I know. Months without an update. You can imagine what upwards of 400-500 pages of reading and a new boyfriend will do to drain your time. ;) Summer will hopefully be more productive. Leave some love (or scorn) for your too-often-MIA writer! Hopefully you all enjoyed this chapter.


	17. Catching

SEVENTEEN

_Catching_

Severus Snape was more amused than he'd been in years. It was usually an effort to force a smile when it was required; the muscles in his cheeks tonight, however, were sore from an unusual amount of smirking. Every time Hermione whispered a derisive comment in his ear or gazed innocently into his eyes only to convey the image she saw over his shoulder, it was an effort to muffle a continual stream of snickers.

Minerva—and several of their fellow professors—were beside themselves. He had seen, on more than one occasion, money changing hands. There had been a bet on, apparently.

He met her gaze again, only briefly, before she let out a startled laugh and rested her head against his shoulder, snuggling closer while they danced.

The playfulness of their prank was punctuated by these heavy moments, moments when her closeness reminded him of the conclusion he had come to over the last several weeks. It wasn't just a game for her, either; he could see that much in her amber eyes, which reflected too vividly the activity of her brilliant mind. She was careful, though, fearful, terrified to trust herself or to believe that any of his actions truly meant he returned her affections. Or, if he did, that those affections were strong enough. So she made it a game, a way to torture their interfering speculators, and didn't risk a thing.

He admired her for it. It was what he would do, to maintain the illusion of his own safety.

They had danced for well over an hour when Hermione brushed a few loosening curls back from her face and looked up at him. "I could do with a slice of pie," she said, her smile flashing briefly with the taste of a smirk. "You're a much better dancer than I ever imagined, and I'm exhausted."

With a smirk in return, he took her hand more comfortably in his to lead her from the dance floor. "I imagine you thought I might trample your feet, Granger?" Her peal of laughter answered him—and turned heads in the vicinity—as he lead her toward a table in the corner, where fresh slices of pie in all varieties were already materializing.

"It's far too easy," she murmured, as he released her hand and she seated herself across from him. "I haven't had this much fun in years."

His black eyes met hers, golden tonight with her demeanour, so at ease as to be infectious; he rifled through his memories, attempting to ascertain when he'd last been so light-hearted, and came up empty-handed. Her eyes widened in shock. "Was that," she began aloud, shakily, but continued, her mind tentatively brushing his, _was that you? I saw…_

He grimaced, but didn't break eye contact. _My apologies_,he returned. _It was a slip of control. Your mind has become a strangely familiar place; the boundaries have become hazy. _He paused, and continued, following the stream of his thoughts, _You've been accidentally sharing your conscious with me for weeks; have you known?_

She hesitated, then shook her head, her eyes still fixed on his. _What does that mean? You've had access to my thoughts, my memories, constantly?_

_No_,he returned quickly. _Nothing near that wealth of information. I've only been able to…hear…your general mood._

She looked unsettled, a little worried. _I'm sorry. I didn't mean—_

_It has not been a burden_, he interrupted. Almost without thought, he reached out to cover her hand with his. _You didn't intend it._

_What does it mean? _Her voice, even in his mind, sounded afraid.

Unintentionally, he rifled through his memories of the last two months, saw how quickly they had gone from tolerable colleagues to wary friends to close. Closer than he'd been to anyone, perhaps, ever. Her eyes filled with tears as she felt, through their strange, prevailing connection, the unfamiliar affection rising in his chest, the streak of loyalty, the protective nature of his interest in her.

_You trust me_,he answered simply. _I need not remind you how dangerous an enterprise that is._

With her free hand, she brushed the tears from her eyes. Her make-up, miraculously, did not smudge. _You've yet to lead me astray_, she replied.

His lip curled in an old sneer. _And you believe that I won't?_

The force of her mind hit him like the wall of a storm; her memories raked through him with unforgiving ferocity, the overwhelming taste of her emotions rolling over him with force. He felt, through her, the relief and comfort as he held her after revealing her diagnosis; the confused gratitude at his insistence on her eating habits; the pleasure she derived from their conversations and his company; the sorrow-shot appreciation for his presence in the aftermath of her familiar's death. He was stunned by the overwhelming organization: a tornado, and yet, a fiercely categorized one, picked out to tell the story she wished to convey. She had grown a hundred times stronger since that first meeting in his office.

"Do you want to know what I think of you?" she said, very softly, but aloud nonetheless. The Great Hall was nearly empty; it was time to usher out the last of the students and begin patrolling for the night. "You are, yes, a mastermind of cunning. You do not make friends easily. You cling to your solitude because it is familiar, and because you believe that you are a force of evil barely contained, one that could contaminate anyone and everyone. I have news for you, Severus Snape. You chose to help me stand when I couldn't even think to crawl. You have done more to earn my trust in the past two months than many have in the last ten years. For a man who sees so much so clearly, it is absurd that you cannot see yourself at all plainly."

She slipped her hand from beneath his and stood. "And now," she said briskly, as though the previous conversation had not occurred at all, "we ought to patrol."

Casting a silencing spell near her feet, she marched off for the doors of the Great Hall, ushering students ahead of her and leaving him no choice but to follow, gathering the stragglers in her wake.

The connection had broken. Her mind was a blank wall now, high and smooth, without any place to enter or exit, even when their eyes met; armed with the knowledge that she was accidentally sharing her consciousness, she had taken pains to erect a barrier. Her features were carefully controlled, painstakingly neutral, as they silently scoured the dungeons and observed floor after floor, secret passage after secret passage, deducting house points and assigning detentions in coordinating tones of disdain. He was utterly certain that she was taking out some of her fury with him—for he had felt the pure rage of it, harsh and righteous—on the pairs they caught snogging in secret passages, clothes dishevelled. Between the two of them, no nook or cranny of the castle went untouched; her extensive knowledge of the castle from her teenage years and his overlong experience in the place combined to form a formidable force.

They were silent except for the deduction of house points, the occasional "Did you hear that?" murmur; even their footsteps were muffled. Severus thought of Hermione's words, her rage, and tried to understand it. She was furious that he would think so low of himself, that he would be so critical, so unwilling to forgive, but she hadn't seen his darkest hours, hadn't witnessed them as he had. She didn't live every day with the blight on her soul. She couldn't possibly comprehend it, the weight of the guilt that he carried, the guilt that no action could erase. If she had experienced it, he reasoned, she wouldn't be so outraged. She wouldn't be so slow to understand that even twenty years of playing puppet to win the war didn't atone for the things he had done, the lives he had ruined.

His distracted thoughts carried them to the grounds, where they quietly wandered the greenhouses and then made for the Forbidden Forest to run a peripheral sweep. Hagrid greeted them from the doorway of his hut. "Mighty fine 'do tonigh', eh, Professors?" he called out, grinning.

Severus nodded curtly; Hermione replied, her voice tight, "Yes, a lovely party. Good night, Hagrid." The smile faded from the half-Giant's face as they passed, to be replaced by a look of confusion. Perhaps he hadn't witnessed Hermione's storming from the table, but there was no doubt that he could sense her complete iciness now, and he watched them go with worry lining his features.

They followed the narrow path into the trees, listening closely, but Severus knew it was unlikely that any student would stray to a road less followed in these woods; fear did a good job, here, of keeping the teenagers in check. It was only a few minutes, however, before Hermione threw her arm out, stopping Severus in his tracks.

"Listen," she said softly, her voice almost too quiet to hear. "Do you hear that?" She cocked her head to the right. Her cloak rustled over her gown.

It was merely the sound of a nearby stream, he thought, but before he could stop her, she had stepped off the path and begun picking her way toward the noise. She was too far out of reach, already, to grab by the elbow and drag back, and in case she was correct, he didn't wish to make excess noise that might alert a student and scare them off—or, worse, attract the attention of one of the forest's beasts. He followed reluctantly; one never knew what might be lurking off the beaten path.

A few moments later, they stepped into a clearing. Moonlight flooded the place; the bubbling she'd heard in the distance had indeed been the stream that ran through this part of the Forbidden Forest. Everything was silvered with the strange midnight light, but he recognized the clearing. There was a fine patch of knotgrass here, and lovage, too.

"Sorry," she murmured. "It must have been the stream that I heard."

She made to turn back the way they had come, but Severus blocked her path; he wouldn't tolerate her cold shoulder for another moment. It had only just become truly unbearable.

Her eyes darted up to his, but then she looked away. "What?" she said flatly.

"Help me understand," he said quietly, in as gentle a voice as he could muster. "I know I've upset you. I want to know why."

Her surprise made her look up at him again. "What?" she repeated, in a truly questioning tone this time.

He struggled to form the words. "I want to know why you're angry. I don't wish to repeat the incident. Your silence is, surprisingly, quite terrible."

A laugh was startled from her lips, but, just as quickly, her eyes filled with tears. She blinked, hard, and they dispersed.

"I've known you more than half my life," she told him. "I've known you at a distance; I think I've known you up close. And never once during that time have I believed that you got what you deserved." She hesitated, then plunged on. "You were saving our necks and disregarding your own safety and dying for the cause, and no one cared. No one cared enough. No one cared enough to stand as close as I'm standing, to try to _see you_, to try to cut through the outer layers of sneering and biting sarcasm, all those defensive walls. No one cared to reach you, and you so deserve it. Severus…" She said his name in a voice so heavy with meaning that his stomach twisted. "You've been so, so alone. And no one stopped to think that the reason you were so angry, so bitter, so unreachable was that the world's never shown you a single damn kindness, even when you gave up your life for it. You must…" Her eyes were glistening with tears again. "You must be so lonely," she said. Her voice shook. "And I just can't imagine, on top of all that, to have to shoulder the burden of your own self-hatred every day. I haven't even _begun _to be as alone as you have, and that on its own almost killed me. You are an incredible man, Severus Snape, and I am angry because you can't see it because of the way people have forced you to see yourself. I'm not angry at you, not truly. I'm angry at every person who told you that you were heartless, that you were less than remarkable, because they were fucking _liars_, and they've hurt you so deeply. I can't…" She took a breath, punctuated by a small sound that might have been a sob. "I can't _stand _that. After everything you've done for me, when you were knee-deep in your own personal hell, I know better than that. I do. I have seen your heart, and it's…"

She reached out with trembling fingers, pressed her palm flat against his chest. His pulse surged, hard, too fast. He was light-headed with her closeness, dizzy with the warmth of her scent.

"It's beautiful," she whispered.

Severus Snape was a man always on the defensive; he sought to see through everyone's lies, call out their pity for what it was, dismiss anyone's half-hearted attempts to reach him. He couldn't defend, though, against the girl he had lost sleep trying to heal, against the woman who had saved his life, the one person who seemed unflinching in her belief that his life was worth saving.

"Hermione," he said, his voice strangely weak, reaching out with no small degree of hesitation to draw her closer. She came, willingly, her eyes gazing up at him; he could pick out the stars overhead, reflected in those golden-brown orbs.

"I mean it," she breathed, and he felt the force of her sincerity as the walls around her mind crumbled to let him in, and the spark that connected them strengthened to a bridge until she could feel his confusion, his overwhelming gratitude, the emotions he couldn't begin to articulate but were clawing their way from his heart nonetheless.

"I know," he said; his voice cracked, and, unable to stop himself, he broke the gaze, eyes falling instead to her lips.

They were too close, his arm wrapped around her waist, his fingers splayed across her lower back, the scent of her—soft vanilla, sweet apple—filling his head until he couldn't think, could barely breathe.

"Severus," she whispered.

He pulled her closer, until her small body was pressed gently to his; his free hand slid into her mass of curly, luxurious hair, beginning to come free of its pins.

"Stop me," he said roughly. He knew before her hands fisted in his shirt that she wouldn't; she was too stubborn to take orders, and not remotely afraid of what would happen if she disobeyed him—not anymore.

* * *

><p>Hermione stared up into his black eyes, and, for the first time, saw unfaltering, genuine warmth there, paired with an uncertainty that made her heart swell.<p>

"Please," she said, without being sure of what she was asking for. His fingers gently tightened in her hair, tipping her head back just slightly. "Just…"

Her head swam at his proximity; the blood pounded in her ears; the chatter in her mind was too loud to allow her to think with logic or detachment. She merely _felt_, so powerfully that it overrode all else, and it was the most painfully wonderful kind of feeling she had known in years, perhaps ever. She felt him, the light pressure of his fingertips against the small of her back, the tiny movements of the breath rising and falling in his chest, the power of his gaze as he looked at her as if truly, fully seeing her for the first time—but that was absurd. He had seen her more clearly than anyone, right from the start, two months ago, when she had been not waving but drowning.

And it wasn't just that—she saw _him._ She saw the force of his indomitable will and the sheer force of his loyalty, and it made sense, really, why she had been, even at the outset, so drawn to him; they were qualities she admired, qualities she adored, and perhaps she hadn't also seen his kindness then, but she saw it now.

She didn't have to go very far. A few inches, and she could act on the attraction she had tried to smother for months. A few inches, and she could do what she hadn't even dared dream to do.

She leaned up and pressed her lips to his.

He was hesitant, reluctant, but her arms wound up around his neck and she felt him give in. His fingers tightened in her hair a little more, tilting her head back further, allowing her to come down off her toes as they kissed. The hand on her lower back pressed her more tightly against him. It was gentle, soft, but deep, and the warmth his lips washed through her overpowered the cool air of the first midnight of November.

Severus pulled back, just enough to protest, and she interrupted. "Stop," she insisted, her voice a whisper. "Don't think, just…"

And he was kissing her again, more passionately this time as the tide of her mind reached out to envelope him; the hand that had been in her hair slid down to hold her waist, and then her hips. She cupped the back of his neck and pulled him closer, closer, and his lips attacked hers with a fervour that she returned, as though they were both dying of thirst and the other was water, the purest, sweetest water they had ever tasted—

And then all was dark as he wrenched himself away and put ten paces between them, his hands forcibly in his pockets, and stood utterly still, watching her with a strange frenzy in his dark eyes. She felt strangely bruised, wonderfully triumphant, and terribly cold without his heat pressed to her. She took a step toward him, but he mimicked the step back, keeping space between them.

"Severus," she said softly, her voice hoarse. "What is it?"

The burning man was back, but this was a different variety. The pain was so fresh, so terrible as he looked at her, fire in his black eyes.

"I am nineteen _years _your senior," he said forcefully, his voice rough, too.

"Do I look like I give a damn?" she demanded. "Do you think I haven't considered that, and obviously disregarded it?"

"Hermione," he said, agony in his voice, "you have to consider—what you're feeling—I have been closest to you in your darkest hours. Are you not just clinging to the first life vest you've been thrown in years?"

"I'm not," she interrupted, talking over him. "I know I'm not."

"Nineteen years," he repeated grimly. "Former Death Eater. You are young, a hero of war—"

"You are all these things too, Severus," she cut across him. "Forty-four is not _old_, not by Wizarding standards, not by a long shot. And there's an argument for you being the biggest damn hero of war there ever was—"

"An argument only you would make."

"Harry wouldn't find it amiss, either, and that's saying a lot, coming from the Boy Who Lived."

His lip curled in a snarl, and he turned away, beginning to pace.

"I know what I feel," Hermione said firmly, crossing her arms over her chest, defiant. "Tell me what I have to do to prove it to you."

He looked up, stopping in his tracks.

"Prove it to me?" he repeated sardonically.

She nodded.

"You want," he said slowly, slowly picking his way back to her, "to _prove _it to me?"

She stared at him, the defiance already leaving her; she simply didn't have the energy. "What else can I do?" she asked softly. "I'm not going to let you walk away from this, not after what I just felt. Not after…how _you _felt." She closed the gap between them until they were close again, and she could search his features more thoroughly. "Could you really just walk away from that, though?" she asked quietly, pleadingly. "It's obvious that there's something there, Severus."

He looked back at her, his eyes unreadable now, his silence deepening by the second.

"I can offer you nothing," he said abruptly. "I am, every inch, scarred and broken. Better than I once was, perhaps, but I will never be whole."

"I don't believe that," she contradicted quietly. "You've already offered me everything."

He regarded her for another long moment.

"Wait," he said finally, softly, his voice quite defeated.

Her brows furrowed. "Wait?" she repeated.

"We cannot…we cannot pursue this. Not now." He raised a hand as she began to protest. "I did not say that we would _never _pursue this. But it is unwise, while you are still unwell. You have made a great deal of progress, Hermione, and I would not derail that, even for my own selfish ends. We must wait." As she moved to shake her head, to protest that this was unrelated to her recovery, he talked over her, his voice full of force. "These are my terms," he said, and there was some sorrow there, too, as though he believed that once she was well again, she would not spare him a second thought.

She hesitated, but finally sighed, nodding. "If those are your terms," she answered.

Something shifted in his dark eyes and he had suddenly pulled her close, his hands curled again around the curve of her hips, his mouth fervently devouring hers. She responded in kind, with passion, her fingers pressing so tightly into his shoulders that they had gone numb by the time the kiss was done.

"I will not judge you harshly if, when you're well, you do not decide to stay," he told her quietly, his breath ghosting across her lips.

Hermione closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, pressed as tightly as she could to him without melting into him entirely. "You can't get rid of me that easily, Severus Snape," she said thickly through the tears that were gathering behind her eyelids, and heard his sigh of exasperation as his arms closed around her, offering her comfort.

* * *

><p><span>AUTHOR'S NOTE<span>: Hermione's narrative about "not waving but drowning" is a nod to a poem of the same name, my favourite of all the poetry we read in Contemporary British Literature this semester. If you want a good, short, poignant read, it's only three stanzas; the author's name is Stevie Smith.

I did not expect this story to take this particular turn, but who am I to resist the words that demand to be written?


	18. Aftermath

EIGHTEEN

_Aftermath_

Moments after waking and adjourning to her sitting room for coffee, Hermione heard a knock at her office door. Sighing heavily, she glanced at the time. It was barely eleven in the morning. Cinching her robe tightly around her waist, she made for her office. It wasn't a particularly familiar knock; Severus and Minerva both had distinct patterns when pounding on doors, and this matched neither. _Probably a student, _she thought wearily.

"Yes?" she asked, politely as she could, as she opened the door.

Neville was levitating a tray of food behind him; she was forcibly reminded of Harry. "You just missed breakfast," he supplied unhelpfully, as she raised an eyebrow at the platter. "I thought…"

She sighed again and stood back. "Come in, Neville." She let the door fall shut behind him and followed him through to her sitting room.

"The staff is beside themselves," he told her as they settled in on the couch, barely suppressing a grin.

She stifled yet another heavy sigh, and shrugged. "I don't see what about," she muttered.

He looked askance at her, surprised. "You're telling me that nothing happened last night?"

"Something happened." She nibbled at a piece of toast, not remotely hungry.

He eyed her, seeming to finally sense her heavy mood. "Hermione, what's wrong?"

"It's just not as simple as all that," she said quietly. "It's not as simple as it should be."

She made her decision in a heartbeat; she pulled up the sleeve of her robe, baring the scar that had reappeared from beneath the glamour last night. Neville promptly dropped his piece of toast.

"It's hard to tell the details," she said; even to her, her voice sounded flat, emotionless. "But…have you heard of Posttraumatic stress disorder?"

Nervously, he nodded. "Harry's been…do you know? He's been pushing the Ministry to look into it. Too many war veterans still not sleeping, turning up at St. Mungo's for problems caused by the sleep deficiency…I got one of the charms, you know, but I stopped having trouble sleeping a few years ago. Nightmares from time to time, but I guess I got off easy."

"That's good," she said, and now her voice was full of relief. "Thank Merlin."

But recognition was dawning in his eyes; the puzzle pieces seemed to be falling into place. "You didn't, though," he said quietly.

She shook her head, pulling her sleeve down. "Until about a month or so ago, I was barely sleeping three or four hours per night. Still having nightmares. I stopped self-harming after seventh year, but…I've been distant. Cutting people out. And Severus…" She swallowed. "Obviously, he's been there, he's experienced the worst of it. I can't begin to imagine the nightmares he must have…all those years…and he's by no means the picture of mental health, but he found his way through it, through the most horrible things. He certainly doesn't have the insomniac tendencies that I do, not anymore, unless he's doing research on me. Trying to get me well."

The shock on his face was surreal. She wasn't sure why she was telling him this, only that the weight of the secret suddenly felt as if it might crush her. "That's why you've been hanging round him so much," he said slowly.

"It started off that way. Sort of. He noticed, you know, he understood the signs of the symptoms, and he's been teaching me Occlumency—Legilimency, too, after a fashion—as a way to help…cope. To recover. And we duel to let off steam, sometimes. It started that way, actually. That day I walked into his classroom, we had a sort of…er…impromptu duel, and decided it would be a good thing to do on a regular basis, and then I found out he could do wandless magic, and I wanted to learn, of course, but he said I would need to master Occlumency first. And from there…he figured it out. We've been friends, obviously, for some time now—"

"And that's why it's not simple," he concluded.

She nodded. "We…kissed, last night." Neville barely restrained a gasp; it came out as a sharp hiss. "But he won't…he won't explore this…this thing between us…until I'm recovered to his satisfaction. He thinks," and she laughed, a disbelieving chuckle, "that the only reason I care about him is because of all the work he's done to help me. It's absurd. I must have felt something for him all this time, honestly. The admiration of being his student must have become something else…enough to nearly kill myself saving his life. It's so much more than his function as a 'life vest'." Tears pricked at her eyes, and she brushed them away.

"Seven years," Neville said hoarsely, extracting an arm from between them and wrapping it around her shoulders instead. "Bloody hell, Hermione. I'm so sorry. I can't believe none of us noticed." He gave her a gentle squeeze.

She shook her head. "It isn't anyone's fault," she insisted. "I was good at concealing it."

"Even Ron…"

"Ron noticed something, he just didn't know how to help me because I wouldn't let him," she interrupted. "It was unfair of me, but I didn't want to share this. I thought that, if I did, I would never get better...or that I would make us worse. And I didn't want to burden anyone. I have to tell Harry," she said miserably. "And Ginny, and even Ron, if we ever get on speaking terms again. I've been keeping this from them for so long…and it isn't fair, is it? It's not fair at all. I'm just…I'm terrified of how they'll react."

"Hermione," he said gently, squeezing her shoulders again, "they're your friends. They'll want to know. They'll want to do what they can to help. Even if that just means dragging you out of the dungeon every once in a while to see the rest of the world. And they'll want to know about Snape, too," he added. "You know…you know how highly Harry thinks of him, and he won't care in the slightest, you know that. They support you. I do, too. It's unconventional, you and Snape, but I see it, you know? He can keep up with you. You can keep up with him. It makes sense. And with everything he's done for you…obviously he sees it, too. Just give it time. Get better. And he'll see it eventually."

She smiled, finally, a little relief stealing over her. "Thanks, Neville." Suddenly hungry, she leaned forward to inspect the bacon. They talked of less dire things while they ate, and her heart felt significantly lighter.

* * *

><p>Hermione didn't send an owl ahead to warn Harry that she was coming. She knew she was more than welcome at the Potters' for dinner, and was looking forward to seeing her first godson, James Sirius, for the first time in months. He would have grown considerably by now, she thought, smoothing her cloak as she pressed the doorbell and craned her neck to look up at the house in Godric's Hollow. For a moment, she saw double: the house with the bedroom blasted out overlaid on the repaired, cosy home. Harry had done considerable work to fix up his earliest childhood home after the war.<p>

"Coming!" the voice of Ginny Potter called, and then yelled over her shoulder, "Are we expecting someone, Harry?"

The muffled reply was lost in the shuffle at the door, and Ginny, very pregnant, James propped on her hip, cracked the door open. "Hermione!" she said, with surprise and delight. Warmth and the scent of cinnamon curled out of the house, brushing welcoming tendrils against Hermione's face. It felt strangely like coming home.

It was so strange to see Ginny now, Hermione realized. It had been months, but that wasn't the difference she saw; it was, instead, the difference of seven years. The young girl was gone: this was clearly a woman, with shallow laugh lines appearing around her smile and the corners of her eyes. Her red hair was a bit shorter now than it had been in her youth, only falling just past her shoulders, but it was as vibrant as ever, and her brown eyes sparkled with a familiar, faint mischief.

"You're just in time for dinner!" she was exclaiming, as she grabbed Hermione's wrist with her free hand and pulled her inside. "You are staying to visit for a bit, won't you? Don't tell me you're running off to—"

Hermione interrupted her friend with a hug, being careful not to squish James. He gurgled happily and tugged at Hermione's hair. "Hermy!" he screeched with joy.

"Of course I'm staying for a bit," she said, letting go of her friend, "I didn't come all the way from Hogwarts to say hello and be on my way."

Ginny smiled. "Good. Your godson clearly missed you."

Hermione held out her arms for the toddler. "I missed him, too." Ginny handed James over with relief, then shut the door behind Hermione. "Hello, darling," Hermione murmured, bouncing James on her hip.

"Hermy," he said happily, pressing his face against her shoulder.

James was Harry in miniature, but with Ginny's brown eyes. Hermione had always found that rather poetic. She followed Ginny to the kitchen, keeping a firm hold on her godson.

"Dinner's ready," Harry said from the stove, clearly having not heard their exchange at the door. "Who was it, anyway? I heard James—"

"We have a visitor," Ginny chimed, taking a seat at the small table, "and it's about damn time."

Hermione blushed, and Harry turned in confusion, but when he caught sight of her a grin split across his face. "Hermione," he said with delight, and strode forward to envelope her in a tight hug. James grumbled at being crushed between his father and godmother. "You'll stay for dinner?" he demanded, holding her at arm's length. "I reckon it's nothing like a Hogwarts feast, but I do all right with chicken—"

"Yes, yes," she said, smiling up at him, "your wife has already threatened me on that matter." Ginny laughed.

Dinner was a cheerful affair; she would save the real conversation until after James had been put to sleep. She told them stories of her classes, Ginny thanked her for the potion—which had helped considerably—and Harry told her about his recent work at the Ministry.

"The charm," he asked, while they sipped their after-dinner tea, "did it help?"

Hermione glanced at James, and shook her head incrementally. "Later," she said quietly, and, sensing the weight in her voice, Harry dropped the subject.

When Ginny suggested it was time for James to be put to sleep, he threw a fit until Hermione promised to read him his favourite bedtime story first. It was comfortable, she thought, curled up with the toddler and a silly book about rabbits, which she read aloud to him until he fell asleep. She could even see enjoying children of her own someday, perhaps. The little family seemed so bright and happy; it was a distant point on the horizon, but at least it existed now.

She closed the door to the nursery quietly behind her and found her way to the sitting room, where Harry and Ginny were talking in low voices. "He's asleep," she said, and Ginny breathed a sigh of relief.

"Thanks, Hermione," she said, leaning against Harry's shoulder. "We're both so tired of that story. It's his favourite, and he wants it every night now."

She smiled, seating herself in a nearby comfortable armchair. "It wasn't a problem. He's lovely."

"He's a trouble-maker," Harry said grimly. "I'm terrified of the day when that child goes off to Hogwarts. You're going to have your hands full if he ends up in Gryffindor."

She laughed. "Maybe he'll be more obedient for me than the other professors."

"One can hope." Harry looked at her closely. "How are you, Hermione?"

She took a deep breath and leaned forward; they both tensed. "Look," she said quietly. "I have something to tell you both, and I'd really like it if you just let me talk first and get through it."

Harry nodded, the anxiety in his features minimal but apparent. "Of course. Fire away."

So she talked. She told them about the years of nightmares and sleeplessness; she apologized for pushing them further and further away until they were at arm's length; she told them that Severus had been helping her, the story of their friendship, the events that had transpired last night; she insisted that they not blame themselves, that no one was to blame, and that she was healing. And she apologized again, for good measure, before waiting for them to interject.

Harry took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Ginny's look of horror was overwhelming.

"The charm didn't do a thing, did it," Harry said wearily.

Sighing, Hermione shook her head. "Severus thinks it's quite beyond charms and spells." She looked more closely at her oldest friend, now with his head in his hands. "Harry? What is it?"

He stood up abruptly and began to pace. "Those fools at the Ministry, that's what," he said, his voice low to contain his fury, but she heard the strain nonetheless. "They've been batting aside my suggestions for years. You're not the only one, Hermione."

"How bad is it?" she asked, horrified.

"Bad, and getting worse," Ginny interjected quietly. "It's not just war heroes, obviously, it goes so much deeper than that, and the ones who are still suffering are a hundred times worse than the symptoms we saw initially. It's so taboo, the idea of mental illness, in the Wizarding world…"

"In the Muggle world, too," Harry interrupted, frowning. "But it's a hundred times worse here, because it isn't something that can be fixed by magic."

"The young adults who most recently graduated from Hogwarts," Ginny said sadly. "That's the worst. They were just children when we were fighting the final battle. Imagine the effect, when you're eleven years old. And the Ministry…"

Hermione stood up too. "We have to do something," she said, looking pleadingly at Harry. "What happened to draw your attention to this? How did you find out?"

He and Ginny exchanged a look full of weight. "There has been a rash of suicides," Harry said quietly. "The Ministry's leaning on The Prophet to keep is very hushed up, but I doubt you've been reading that rag lately, anyway."

"It isn't," Hermione said, her voice shaking, "there hasn't been anyone we know, has there?"

Harry looked at his wife. Her face was quite stoic as she replied, very quietly, "We have to keep George under watch quite closely now." She spoke to her hands. "It's been…getting worse and worse for him, you know, worse than for the rest of us. He has to see Fred's face every time he looks in the mirror. It was hard enough, without that, but I can't imagine…" She cleared her throat.

"Oh, Ginny," Hermione said miserably, sitting down next to her friend to put an arm around her. "I'm so sorry."

Ginny nodded against her shoulder. "It's all right. Mum and Dad are being careful."

Hermione looked up at Harry. "We have to do something," she said pleadingly. "I haven't…I haven't even been that far down, and what I have experienced was still so horrible. We have to stop this."

"You have to get well first," he said firmly. "I won't have you handing out leaflets while you're still recovering."

She looked at him in shock. He looked back, puzzled. "What?" he asked.

"Nothing," she murmured. "It's just…that's just what Severus said."

He shook his head. "Look," he said. "What you're doing, with him, it's helping you, right?"

She nodded.

"And you don't reckon that's just because of the thing you've got going." The ghost of a smirk crossed his lips.

She smiled weakly. "Not a chance. I didn't believe for a second that we would ever get a 'thing' going at all."

"Then listen." He sat down on Ginny's other side. "I can't do a damn thing with the Ministry because I don't have a solution. Those charms obviously haven't helped at all. And when they don't have a solution to a problem, they just won't advertise the problem. Kingsley's all behind it, of course, but his hands are tied by Parliament, too. He can only do so much. But if…if we had a solution…something that worked in a third-party research trial…" He looked at her meaningfully.

"Then we could get it working," she said immediately. "If Severus and I submit our findings when I'm through, if I recover, then…then we could implement the strategy and start helping people." She took a deep breath. "Severus is already keeping very detailed notes, I'm sure. I ought to start, too."

He nodded. "Every little piece would help," he said. "It has gotten quite serious, and it's not exactly my division, or anything, but…I fought next to some of these people." He looked at Ginny. "With Voldemort gone, it just seems unfair that he's somehow still manipulating their lives. It seems _wrong_."

"We'll fix it," Hermione promised, giving Ginny a squeeze before getting to her feet. "I ought to inform Severus."

"Hermione," Ginny asked hesitantly, "have you talked to Ron, yet?"

She shook her head. "I will soon," she said firmly. "I owe him an explanation."

"He's still a prat," the redhead said stiffly.

Hermione smiled. "Yes, he's still a prat," she said. "But it wasn't all his fault, you know. And of course, it wasn't all mine, either. But we still ought to sort things out. I can't go on ignoring him forever." She glanced at Harry. "I ought to get back. It's late, and I've yet to see him today. He'll want to know."

Harry stood. "I'll walk you out."

"You two go well together, you know," Ginny said suddenly. Hermione wasn't sure if she realized it, but her hands were on her swollen stomach. "I would have loved to have you for a sister, Hermione, but Ron just never would have been enough for you intellectually. Snape…Severus…he will be."

Hermione glanced at Harry. He smiled crookedly. "You know how I feel," he said quietly. "I trust your judgment, and he's proven himself to be not only trustworthy, but determined to help you. It doesn't seem like such an unusual match." He considered something for a moment, then remarked, "And you know, it'll probably help you convince him to come to the naming ceremony, him fancying you and all."

Hermione laughed, Ginny chuckled, and the Potions Mistress departed Godric's Hollow with a significantly lighter heart.

* * *

><p>She had not made an appearance at breakfast, lunch, or dinner.<p>

Severus knew better than to think that she was avoiding him; if anything, she was avoiding the excited buzz of the entire staff, who were simply overwhelmed with what they had seen at the Masquerade Ball the night before. He was forced to make a few remarks at every meal to remind the Headmistress that she was not entitled to every detail of his personal life—but she subsided, pleased with the wealth of non-information. No information was avoidance, in Minerva McGonagall's book, and that meant that there was information to uncover; she was just assuming the wrong sorts of things about what had transpired the previous evening.

Once, he had been unable to scrub the sound of Hermione's sobs from his memory, though he desperately wanted to erase them; now, as he corrected compositions into the night, he couldn't help but remember her voice—her touch—her kiss—and wanted never to forget them. He abandoned the essays eventually. It was no good while he was distracted by the fantasy of her lips, the curve of her waist, the sincerity and determination in those sparkling amber eyes…

He poured himself a goblet of nettle wine—an unusual choice, but he was in an unusual mood—and settled in his armchair beside the fire, ruminating. It was pleasure, he realized as he swirled the liquid beneath his nose; he was experiencing a quiet, rueful sort of happiness, one that couldn't even be erased by the surety that she would change her mind when she was finally well. Perhaps it was because, truthfully, he was unsure, and not certain at all, that she would change her mind. He had never known her to be determined on a topic and eventually choose the opposite. She was far too stubborn for that.

A knock sounded, quiet but sharp, on the door of his office. He glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner as he rose to his feet. Not yet nine, but he was certain it was her. Minerva's pounding was more demanding. He left his goblet on the table beside the fire and ducked through to his office, dismantling wards as he went.

Hermione was, as expected, on his doorstep; less expected was the state of her, pink-cheeked, cheerful and windblown, her hair tangled and wilder than usual. "Hello," she said, smiling brightly at him. "I have things to tell you. May I come in?"

Caught off-guard by her merry disposition, he stepped back to let her through, then re-built the wards behind them as they retreated to his sitting room.

She threw off her cloak over the armchair that had become unmistakably hers; evidently, she had come straight from the outside.

"You're…in quite a good mood," he said cautiously as she seated herself. "Wine?"

She beamed. He hadn't seen her so effortlessly cheerful in a good many years. "Yes, please," she answered, and he poured out another goblet of wine before seating himself across from her. "And yes. I am. I just came from Godric's Hollow."

He raised his eyebrows. "Visiting Potter, I presume."

She took a sip of the wine, shuddered with pleasure at its bitterness, and set it beside her. "Yes," she answered, leaning forward. "I'm not sure what got into me. Neville visited this morning, when I didn't turn up to breakfast, you know—I fancied a bit of a lie-in—and it felt like…" She searched for the word, frowning. "It's difficult to describe, but it felt as though I'd suddenly woken up, as though I've been in a fog for quite a long time, and dawn finally broke over it." She looked at him, though her gaze seemed directed elsewhere—inward. Her barriers were down again, and he felt her thoughtfulness, her strange hum of contentment. She focused quickly, however, and he felt the surge of happiness brighten as she saw him again, the swell of affection in her chest. "I told him," she said finally, her voice almost confused. "I told Neville why I've been so distant, how you and I came to be…friends…" She smiled again, softer this time. "And then I realized that it was really time to tell Harry, and Ginny, what's been happening, what I've been sorting through. No real details, you see, just basic…superficial things. But something Neville said sparked my interest; he mentioned that Harry's been trying to get the Ministry to look into this for years. And when I visited Harry, we had an idea."

"An idea," he repeated sardonically, and she chuckled at his dark tone. "Terrifying."

"Yes." She looked at her hands. "You see, there's…" And her cheerfulness faded quite abruptly, swiftly, as he had expected it to; she was somber and sad once again. "It sounds quite terrible," she said quietly. "I don't know if you knew."

"What?" he said, a touch impatiently.

She looked up again, taking a deep breath. "There's been…a rash of suicides, among witches and wizards who were touched by the war," she told him, her voice strained now. "Harry says that the Ministry has been leaning on The Prophet to keep it quiet. They don't know what to do. They don't have a solution. Those charms…obviously they won't work, for the worst cases, and…" She cleared her throat. "George," she said softly. "George Weasley. His twin…"

"I remember," Severus replied, his voice harsh, not with impatience now but with painful remembrance. "His twin died in front of him at the final battle."

She nodded, eyes bright. "He tried." Severus didn't have to ask what _tried _meant. "They're having to watch him very closely, now, and obviously it's quite severe." She took a deep breath. "I have no right—"

"You have every right," he interrupted. "Ask."

She cleared her throat again. "It's just," she said, and her voice pleaded, "what we're doing, it's working. I'm better, aren't I? I've put on weight, I've—my sleeping has improved—the nightmares, they're not better, precisely, but they're starting to fade…and I figured you must have been keeping notes." He answered with a nod. "I ought to start, too. But I could be the test subject, the first, and if…if I recover…_when _I recover," she amended firmly, "we could present your findings to the Ministry—we could help them. We could stop all this from continuing to happen. And we could train others, we could train Healers the appropriate method—we could run trials, of course—"

"We?" he interrupted again, smirking.

She looked at him with surprise. "Of course," she said. "I want to work with you on this. If you'd prefer to present it yourself, I understand—I'm only a patient right now—but I thought I could be of use. And maybe…when I'm recovered…I could help too. Better than leaflets," she finished, with a shaky smile. "Something real." She leaned forward. "I would be honoured to do this with you, Severus," she said earnestly. "We could really make a difference. And I promise—you're the mastermind behind this, you're the one who discovered the method, you've been brilliant—it's all yours. I just want to help you make it known."

He inclined his head. "There is clearly no use trying to stop you. There never was, when you were determined to make the world a better place."

She smiled at him, raising her glass in a toast, and he wanted nothing more to kiss her again, because Hermione Granger appearing so happy and whole was a beautiful sight indeed.

"Oh," she added, as he drank deeply from his goblet, "there's been something I've been meaning to ask you, as well. Would you accompany me to the naming ceremony for Harry's second son? He desperately wants you to be there, and yes, it will be embarrassing, but I think you'll also be quite honoured, in an offended sort of way. They've set it for January, January 9th, as long as he doesn't take his sweet time the way James did."

He glared at her. "You're quite demanding tonight."

Her eyes twinkled, and her mind reached out to envelope him with the memory of the previous night: warm, passionate, powerful. "I feel like myself again, for the moment," she murmured. "I might as well take advantage of it while I can."

He needn't tell her that the ninth of January would be his forty-sixth birthday; it was evident that she already knew.

"I would like it, quite a lot, actually, if you'd accompany me," she said quietly, her eyes pleading, and he felt the truth of her words in her stare, in the lingering thoughts over the night before, still turning over and over in her mind.

He sighed, heavily, one last time, and gave a curt nod of assent. "Provided that I will not be required to be particularly social, I will come."

"Thank you," she said with sincere gratitude. "You've truly no idea how happy it will make Harry, and it will be lovely to have someone equally intelligent and anti-social to converse with."

He couldn't help but smirk, and she beamed in response.

* * *

><p><span>AUTHOR'S NOTE<span>: And over a year later, I finally figure out what the plot of this whole thing is. Guh. It's been hiding from me. I want to thank everyone, from the bottom of my heart, for your encouraging reviews, and I'm so happy that you're still reading even though I have a tendency to go on hiatus for a very long time. It means the world to me.

Also, even after reading the entire article on how a Parliamentary system of government works, it still confuses me. To be fair, American government has always confused me. I'm just not a politics person, I suppose, so I only alluded to the process briefly (and who the hell knows how the Wizarding government works exactly, anyway? J.K. Rowling, please enlighten us further, and if anyone out there has a source that I have somehow missed, please let me know, just for the sake of my own curiosity).


	19. Progress

NINETEEN

_Progress_

"Not so fast, dear. You've avoided me for nearly four days. Sit."

Severus didn't need to look up to feel the wave of indignation and irritation coming off Hermione as she was pulled into a chair to the left of the Headmistress. He smirked, sipping his coffee with disdain. Minerva ought to know better; Hermione was nearly as foul-tempered as he before ten in the morning. She would get nothing out of her former student at breakfast—nothing new, anyway. He contented himself to eavesdrop, hoping dearly for a smug burst of self-assured triumph from the young Potions Mistress; he took a certain pleasure from seeing the two of them butt heads.

"He won't say a word of it," Minerva said in a voice that ordinary ears, perhaps, wouldn't hear—but Severus Snape was far from ordinary.

"A word of what?" Hermione asked sullenly, reaching for her coffee.

There was a shuffle as Minerva leaned closer. "The Masquerade Ball. You _danced_."

"Merlin, Minerva, you sound like a besotted fifth-year." Hermione's voice was appreciatively scathing. "Friends can dance. We were having a bit of fun. There was certainly nothing else to enjoy at that horror of an event."

"Nothing…happened." The doubt in Minerva's voice was quite thick.

Hermione sighed heavily. "We're friends," she said wearily. "We patrolled after the event and then went our separate ways. As you can imagine, it was an exhausting evening."

Severus glanced down the table in time to see Hermione reach for the porridge and Minerva cast a suspicious look at her, which passed in turn to Severus. He returned it with the barest of smirks and went back to his coffee. It was always a pleasure to see Minerva foiled—almost as much as it had once been a pleasure to thwart Albus. He was half-certain that her recent behaviour stemmed from her predecessor's portrait; the old man was bound to be interfering, even as a fragment of his former self.

He rose from breakfast a short time later and was only out of the Great Hall for a moment when Hermione caught up to him, glowering. "Interfering old hag," she muttered.

He raised an eyebrow. "It was your idea."

She smirked. "I suppose so. But really. It's too early in the morning for her to even _hope_ for a successful interrogation."

They paused in the entrance hall at the foot of the grand staircase, where they would part ways: Hermione to the left, to the dungeons, and Severus up the staircase to the first floor. She smiled up at him. "Patrolling tonight?" she asked.

He gave a short nod. "Nine. We'll meet outside your office."

"See you then," she said brightly, the foul mood of a few moments earlier gone, and vanished on the path he had once beaten into the ground, making her way into the dungeons.

He climbed the stairs to the first floor more slowly. His first period was an empty one, and he was free to continue organizing the notes he had been assembling since Saturday night.

The wealth of information he had accumulated already was vast. Scrolls of parchment simply wouldn't do; the sheaves upon sheaves of organized chronological notes were instead being assembled in bound pages. The initial volume, which covered the scope of his realization of Hermione's illness, her detailed symptoms, and all knowledge he had from his personal memories was already assembled and horrifyingly thick. The memories themselves—their gossamer threads clinging to the insides of crystal phials—were secured within this book as well, each labelled in his spiky handwriting, contained in a compartment in the back cover of the leather-bound volume.

He had not yet begun to assemble the undoubtedly many volumes which would cover her treatment, but he set to doing just that, scanning the pages of notes he had already made and adding annotations where he saw them fit. Slowly, the pages began to compile themselves between new covers.

The week moved slowly. Rain assailed Hogwarts and made their nights of patrol miserable when they were forced to journey outside. "There's simply n-no way students would sn-sneak out in t-this weather, right?" Hermione asked at around midnight on Thursday, her teeth chattering so hard that her syllables were split and stuttered. She was dressed warmly, in boots, a heavy cloak, and at least two jumpers, but it was well below freezing. The rain occasionally turned to sleet as they made the periphery sweep of the Forbidden Forest, where the worst of the downpour was kept at bay but the cold appeared to be held in by the trees.

"Isn't there a warming charm on your cloak?" Severus asked.

She looked at him reproachfully over the collar of her turtleneck, which was pulled up over her nose. "It wore off over an hour ago. And I'm…" She hesitated, clearly embarrassed.

"Drained," he answered, and cast a nonverbal charm on her cloak. She shuddered in reaction to the warmth.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "My magic is not what it once was."

He suspected, as he brooded on that statement the next day, that this week was particularly trying for her. She had made leaps and bounds over the weekend; it had to be having an effect. She looked plainly exhausted, and he felt guilty for his role in her week of emotional highs and lows, but there was nothing to be done. He had made his decision, and the only way to help her now was to pass on a strong dose of Dreamless Sleep and continue their Occlumency lessons that night.

He had not been present in her mind since the previous week, in the Forbidden Forest, and he was braced for the impact that it might have on her—on both of them. When her quiet, methodical knock sounded on his door that night, he rose from his contemplation of the freshly-completed, leather-bound notes, and opened the door to allow her in.

He had never seen her look so radiant as she had the week before—the pleasure of their prank had added to the brilliance she exuded on a day-to-day basis, not to mention the carefully constructed state of her dress—but she was still quietly beautiful, standing on his doorstep, shadows beneath her eyes, the smallest of smiles turning up her lips. Without a word, he stepped aside to let her pass. She didn't speak, either, but went straight through to his sitting room. He raised the many walls of wards behind him as he followed.

Hermione turned when she reached her armchair. "I'm a little tired," she admitted, as though sensing his unasked question.

"You look it," he replied. "How much have you slept?"

She cringed. "Not enough. You'll see it anyway, so…it's the project. The fury of it just swept me up and I've been assembling my own notes retroactively, and sometimes I look up and it's four in the morning. On the bright side, I've been so exhausted that, at that time, I sleep easily. Deeply. It's done, all the catching up, so I might go back to a regular schedule, now. Or my pathetic attempts at one."

"We have time," he said darkly, sweeping across the room. She flinched again. "Why was it necessary to do it all now?"

"While the memories are still fresh…while I'll leave as little out as possible…and don't tell me you haven't been the same. We're far too alike. Once devoted…" She hesitated and didn't finish the sentence.

He rolled up his shirtsleeves. "We'll be going deeper tonight."

She stared, clearly frightened. "Is that…wise?"

"Yes," he answered. "You're weak. There will be less resistance. You've come far, Hermione, but remember what I told you: you cannot bury these things forever. They are already reaching tendrils out…beginning to drag you back down. A mere week of stress, and this." He gestured to her, and she flinched. "It will be a delicate balance forever, until you face the things that have attempted to destroy you."

She rolled her sleeves back, too. The scar of a word appeared, letter by letter, mangling her skin. A spark of determination had re-entered her eyes as they met his. "Get it over with," she said through gritted teeth.

He met no resistance, though she struggled to restrain herself from building walls. The current of her thoughts was more mangled than usual; it reminded him of their first session, her panic, her fear, but what was she afraid that he would find? Surely there was nothing else, nothing so close to her heart as what he had already seen—what he had already heard.

Familiar scenes reappeared to him, remembrances of new moments: the despair in her heart, wrenching him to the core, as Potter's wife informed Hermione of another's suffering; the sorrow that still twisted her mind when she thought of her familiar's death; the time she had spent brooding over _him _and his hard-headedness; the drift of her mind, casually, almost, toward the moments they had shared on a dance floor, in a secluded clearing, in one another's arms. His chest tightened at the memory, and for the space of a heartbeat, he scrambled to refocus, to stand back, to observe rather than absorb.

Perhaps it was just a general fear, he mused as he regained control, scanning the movement of her mental activity. The stress was already wearing her down, and the idea of plunging deeper into her issues would automatically set her on edge; it could be nothing in particular, just the idea, that was causing her dread.

A guilt he hadn't noticed before, however, popped. It tasted of family, and he followed it with no small portion of his own anxiety. If what Potter had said was true, he could guess the content of this newly surfacing shame.

Her terror quickened. _No_, she thought, automatically scrambling to erect barriers, but he pushed through them with relative ease. _No, no, that has nothing to do with—_

_Everything_, he answered grimly, _has something to do with it_. He let himself into the memory.

She was panicked and not yet eighteen. She scurried to stuff the items on her neatly made bed into a knapsack; it could only have been charmed, with the amount of things she tucked away. A nearby _Daily Prophet_ alerted him to the date: it was summer, 1997, and the Dark Lord was on the verge of a world takeover. She glanced at the moving image on the front page—this must have been just before they infiltrated the Ministry, for the Dark Mark glittered and moved beneath a headline full of terror—and jumped when a woman called her name. Her mother, Severus realized; these were her final moments in her parents' home.

The memory of Hermione stuck her arms through her knapsack, hesitated a final moment, and drew her wand. Tears glittered in her eyes, but her gaze was hard. She quietly paced through her bedroom door and down the stairs; Severus followed.

A man and a woman sat in the kitchen, their backs to the entryway, speaking in voices too low to make out. Hermione took a soft breath and raised her wand. "I'll see you soon," she whispered. "_Obliviate_."

He felt the force of the spell even through the memory, the utter complexity of it; she had done her job well. They would never know. They would be safe.

He withdrew from her mind and she sagged against her armchair, then collapsed into it, holding her head in her hands.

"Did you ever find them?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

She hesitated, then lifted her head, gazing at him with defeat and guilt in every line of her young face. "I found them," she answered quietly. "But I couldn't lift the charm. I still—I don't know why. But they're safe, and happy, and…" She trailed off, looking down at her hands.

"And have no idea they have a daughter," he finished.

She laughed weakly. "I'm not sure they'd want to know," she said softly. "I'm not sure they'd ever forgive me, anyway."

* * *

><p>It had been weeks since Hermione had felt quite this crushed, as if stomped on by the heel of the world and the pile of her mistakes. The yawning black hole that had once nearly swallowed her whole threatened to suffocate her. It was with an effort that she kept her nails tight on reality, fighting not to slip back into that memory, the memory of her failure. It was a great and horrible failure, but it had become comfortably routine.<p>

He was silent still, perhaps mulling over her last statement, so she continued, brushing it off. "I might have still been recovering," she said, desperation colouring her tone just slightly. "My magic wasn't at its best."

"You expect me to believe you haven't gone looking for them again?" Disbelief saturated Severus's voice.

She lifted her head to look at him; the strange, subtle empathy in his dark eyes twisted her heart. "My magic isn't at its best," she repeated, changing the tense of the word. "I find them again every year. I went last summer. The longer the charm goes untouched, the stronger it seems to become. They've put down roots, made their new lives realistic. Maybe that's why it's so hard to lift." She turned away again, unable to bear the force of her shame in his presence. "Or maybe I messed up," she said. "I might have done something wrong in casting the charm."

"I can't be certain—a memory is no place for surety—but nothing seemed amiss." His clothes rustled as he took a few paces nearer to stand before her. He lifted his hand as if to touch her cheek, but almost as soon as the movement had begun, his hand fell back to his side. She released the breath she had momentarily held. "The more likely scenario," he continued, "is that you are restraining yourself from lifting the charm."

Her head jerked up. Severus looked quite serious. "That's absurd," she retorted.

"Not absurd; subconscious." She opened her mouth to interrupt, but he warned her with a look. "Your shame and guilt is shackling you. You are afraid that they will never forgive you for wresting their free will from them, and you are terrified to let them know you as you are now. You know that they, of all people, will be able to see through every mask that has fooled everyone else. You don't want them to know that you are suffering." He gazed at her as if waiting for a contradiction, but she had none; she looked away instead.

"It's like they're dead," she whispered. "It's like they've been dead for years. I don't know what I would do, what I would say, what I would tell them, if they were suddenly my parents again. I want them to be, I'm just…" She hesitated on the word.

"Acknowledge it." His voice was gentle but firm.

Hermione swallowed. "I'm afraid."

"Explain."

She stood up, brushing by him to pace in front of the fire. He watched her; though she wasn't looking at him, she could feel his eyes, the full attention of his gaze. Worse, she could feel his presence: she could drive herself insane imagining the hands that had tangled in her hair, the arms that had wrapped around her, the lips that had devoured her. The impact of being in a room with him, of pretending as if the previous week hadn't happened, hit her as if she had run full-force into a stone wall and was momentarily stunned.

She stopped pacing and faced the hearth, her back to him, taking quick, shallow breaths, trying to control herself. _Remembering anything is agony_, she thought without heat, closing her eyes. The warmth of the fire washed over her. By degrees, she emerged from the turmoil of her mind while he waited, patiently, standing back, giving her space.

If only he could comprehend that the last thing she wanted was space; if only she didn't feel honour-bound by the terms she had agreed to. The desire in her soul felt as if it might consume her. It terrified her. She had thought, once, that she loved Ron; this was something else entirely, a new degree of affection she had never tasted before.

She struggled to refocus, to trade one suffering for another. The guilt was an unwelcome exchange, the shame even more uninvited. The admission of her wrongdoing and subsequent failure—all centred on her still too-feeble stores of magic—was humiliating to discuss with Severus, and the personal component made it all that much harder to bear. Willingly exposing vulnerabilities before this man still did not come easily.

"It was wrong," she finally said, turning to face him. "But it…it was all I could think of. I knew that they would be a target, once I was off looking for horcruxes with Harry and Ron, and I knew that even if they went into hiding in another country, Death Eaters might have found them, so—so the only way it was safe was if they didn't exist. I knew someone, someone talented enough, could find them and break the memory charm, but I thought that it was still a worthwhile precaution. To do everything I could to keep them safe. But it felt wrong. It still feels wrong. Taking their free will from them…it might have kept them safe, but it violated them so deeply, I know that." She took a deep breath, steadying herself. "And even if I could lift the charm…what if, because of all that, they never wanted to see me again? It would be even worse. At least right now I can hope that, if they ever do come round, they'll forgive me. Once they do, it's one way or the other. That's it. It seems…terrible."

"Is it?" Severus mused, taking a seat in his armchair. "Wouldn't it be better, knowing you'd done what you could to reverse the damage, and having an opportunity to explain that to them fully?"

She hesitated. "It would be better," she acknowledged. "Better from a moral standpoint, even from one of personal turmoil, I suppose…at least I would know. But I haven't been able to lift the charm. And I don't know when I will."

"Your magic is not what it was, that's true," he told her. "And, yes, memory charms tend to strengthen over time. But someday you will have the strength. What will you do then?"

Something in his tone caused her to bristle, put her on her guard. "Rest assured, Severus, I will keep trying until the charm is lifted," she said icily. "I am afraid, but I am not a coward."

He looked at her, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. She was distracted by the secret of it, hiding there at the edge of thin lips that she had kissed so recently.

"What?" she asked finally, when the silence stretched too long.

"Progress," he answered simply. His deep voice, curling with a strange pleasure around the word, ushered warmth into her chest.

* * *

><p><span>AUTHOR'S NOTE<span>: Tempting though it is after some reviews I received in the last week, I won't be attempting to tweak or correct any odds and ends in previous chapters until I get through to the end of this. I tend to get mired in that sort of thing, so it's best to wait for the end. Thanks to those of you who pointed out some continuity errors, and I extend my deep appreciation to my continuing readers and reviewers. Your words keep me writing.

Also, though for the most part I go by book canon, there is one major portion of this fic that is based on movie canon: Hermione's _Mudblood _scar. When I started writing this fic, the image stood out to me so much in the film that I just couldn't get away from it, which is why I ended up using it.


	20. Rage

TWENTY

_Rage_

The library was a deep, dark, lovely place to get lost in at night.

She missed Severus on the evenings when they didn't patrol. She missed him all day long, in fact, even when he was sitting right beside her at mealtimes, or prying apart layers of her mind on Fridays, or impatiently flicking aside yet another useless curse with his impressive shield. She missed a different kind of togetherness than the one they currently had, but she had a quiet peace with it now. _Soon_, she promised herself, allowing a dull peace to wash through the briefly exaggerated turmoil in her mind. _Wait it out._

Hermione set down her lantern in a corner tucked deep within the Restricted Section, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. She tucked thoughts of him away, in a corner of her mind that reminded her of the room they'd once locked up together, and when her eyes opened again, she was calm. Once, not so long ago, it had taken her every effort to control herself—her thoughts, in particular. Now, though, it was simple, so long as she was not in his presence. He complicated things. He stirred up her emotions and her mental activity, though she knew he certainly didn't mean to. It was harder to present a cool, united front to him, but she was slowly becoming more capable. The Occlumency lessons, the periodic duelling, the pages upon pages of notes and speculation and, for lack of better word, the administration of therapy—it was all working. She was coming under her own control again.

She glanced out the window to her right. The moon was pale and enormous, looming over the lake, casting brilliant highlights across the water. She wrapped her cloak more tightly around her—it was cold in the vast library at night—then pulled out a chair and sat, observing the movement of tiny waves for a moment, before returning to her perusal of the bookshelf before her.

At some point, as a young girl, Hermione had seen the Hogwarts library and longed to read every book within its significant depths. Now she had more specific goals, and they revolved around the section before her. The library was not particularly well-organized, at least not to the well-trained eyes, but she had studied the structure enough as a teenager to have a good feeling about what went where. With a last glance over her shoulder, she pulled a new volume out for examination.

For two weeks, now, she had done the same thing. In her spare time, she had searched for strange cases that involved memory charms.

There was a new determination in her mind to lift a spell—no, a curse—now more than eight years old. Nearly a decade. A wave of despair threatened, momentarily, to wash away the focus of her intellect, but she firmly smothered it and bent over the text, scanning with bright brown eyes. This particular volume had caught her eye while looking over this section simply for its title: _Unsolved Cases of Enduring Curses_. The first word of the missive was not particularly heartening, but she plunged in nonetheless, hoping for new clues. Her quill, self-inking, poised nimbly between her fingertips over a fresh piece of parchment as she searched, waiting for something noteworthy.

A pattern had begun to recur in her weeks of study. Many strange incidents she stumbled across—incidents where the caster of a spell became completely incapable of reversing its effects—reflected a situation that was, at least in generalities, eerily similar to hers: a trauma suffered, never mentioned in connection with the incident, but in passing, as if giving a biography. How could no one have noticed? Had no wizard considered the absolute power of the human mind in stymying even magic?

She read on as the moon rose through the height of the window and disappeared behind stone, blinking heavily a few times as sleep started to lure her down. She was nearly to the end of the book…if only she could finish it, she would return to her quarters to sleep…

"You ought to be sleeping."

She jumped, accidentally blotting the parchment with ink. Severus emerged from around the corner of a bookshelf, his cloak billowing behind him, which added impressively to the frown he directed at her. She still found it difficult to do anything more than stifle a smile in return.

"It isn't that late," she contradicted mildly, then glanced at her watch and winced. "I suppose it is a little late," she allowed as he seated himself beside her. "Time gets away from me while I'm here. I intended to leave an hour ago, I think."

"The dangers of becoming employed at Hogwarts." He tilted his head just enough to see what she was reading. "_Unsolved Cases of Enduring Curses_?"

She cleared her throat. "I've just been…looking into it." Her voice, even to her, sounded unconvincing.

"You've been researching." He did not appear surprised, nor did he appear particularly unhappy about the revelation. "May I?" She nodded, and he pulled the book toward him. "And what have you discovered?" he asked, dark eyes beginning to scan the page.

"There…seems to be a recurring pattern." He raised an eyebrow, and she rushed on. "It's not just memory charms. It's curses in general, things that have to be reversed. Big ones, of course, nothing trivial, but…it seems as if, more often than not, when the curse can't be lifted, there's some sort of trauma in the caster's history. I think there's more psychological interference in magic than anyone has caught onto. It's never mentioned in connection to whatever spell has gone awry, more in passing, as if—as if—"

"As if no one has noticed the link." He glanced up, question in his eyes.

"Or," she said hesitantly, "as if someone's covering it up. As if…they have noticed…but they've been ignoring it, because there's no method. Nothing to treat it."

He looked at her for a moment, and then, as if resigned, stood up and began to search in a nearby shelf. "This might interest you," he said heavily, handing her a hardly-touched, enormous leather volume. The title was embossed in gold on the front cover: _A Tragic Loss: An Examination by St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries of the Treatment of Mental Illness_.

"What on Earth," Hermione murmured, opening to the table of contents. "This was printed in 1987. That's not long after…"

"The Years of Terror," Severus answered, nodding. "Not long after the Dark Lord's first rise to power was stymied by Potter."

She looked down at the book again, rifling through the pages. "They knew," she said, horrified.

"How could they not?" he said quietly. "The symptoms were much the same as they are now. The Dark Lord's first rise to power was, some might argue, much worse than his second. He had much more control, for an extended period of time, stayed longer in the shadows, created such an atmosphere of fear…an inquiry had to be made. It was unsuccessful." He nodded at the text. "They wasted time attempting to devise a potion, a spell, a magical regimen—"

"We're using Occlumency," Hermione interjected, frowning.

"And it is not a quick fix, is it?" She sighed and nodded, agreeing. "Occlumency is beyond the majority of wizards. It is an extremely complex art, only useful in your case because you are a much higher-than-average calibre of witch."

This startled a smile out of her, but it quickly faded as the full meaning of his words sank in. "But then," she said slowly, "if that's the case—how will this, what we're doing, work for anyone else?"

He eyed her, a weary look on his features. "I don't know," he answered, clearly troubled. "It's possible that they need not master the magic of the thing—that imagination alone will suffice—but that is not my concern at the moment."

A hot flash of rage seared suddenly through her chest; her gaze dropped from his, but not quickly enough.

"Look at me."

The rage had already burned out by the time she met his eyes again; she could feel him exploring their connection, mystified.

"You were angry."

"Yes," she answered, already drained by the sudden burst of feeling. "And now I'm not."

"Why?"

She frowned. "It takes too much energy."

He studied her, clearly brooding. "This happens often?"

She paused, thinking. "If I get angry, it doesn't last long," she admitted. "It's exhausting. I run out of fuel so quickly—my energy is better spent on other things…I don't seem to have much in me, anyway. My anger always runs out, especially when it…isn't specific."

"You believe it isn't specific?"

She looked up at him, confused. "What are you getting at?"

"You expect me to believe that your rage is not very precise? That this absence of persistent emotion is not just another coping mechanism? I have been inside your head, Hermione—I know exactly how adept you are at shutting down your own troublesome thoughts and emotions—"

"That isn't fair," she protested. "You're exactly the same way—"

"And it has done me so much good, hasn't it?" He got to his feet; she flinched at the sarcasm in his voice. "Repressing rage, and guilt, and fear—you can only do these things so long before they begin to burn you alive from the inside, before they leave permanent damage."

"What are you doing?" she asked warily, watching him draw his wand.

"Accessing your anger." His gesture encompassed the whole of the library, and the magic spread outward from their secluded corner, protecting the books and furniture and silencing the room.

"Severus—it's late—"

"All the better," he answered. "If you're tired, your defence mechanisms are already weakened."

"Is this really important?" she pleaded as his wand flicked to the lanterns left burning in the cavernous room. The flames went out, plunging them into darkness, save for the weak moonlight streaming through the tall windows. In his clothes and cloak, he blended too well with their surroundings, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

Fear momentarily paralyzed her. The breathless anticipation of battle carried a more familiar flavour than any of their duels in the past; the shadows reminded her too vividly of another dark night in this castle, of other midnights spent running and hiding, hiding and running. She had to move—she was too near the spill of moonlight, too easily spotted. She crept forward, wand at the ready, and slipped down another long row of books, praying he wasn't lurking near the end.

Her heart hammered in her chest as she reached the end of the long bookshelf, peeked around the corner, and fled quietly up the flight of stairs which led to the upper level of the library. She realized belatedly that she ought to have spelled her shoes for silence, and did so nonverbally, cursing the small burst of light which marked her spell.

The first attack came from behind her; she dropped to the ground just in time to avoid it. "Tell me what you're angry about, Hermione," he said, and though his voice was quiet, it seemed to carry from far away.

She attacked in turn, saw the flash of light absorbed in his permanent shield, and dodged to the side again just in time to avoid a curse she didn't recognize. She lifted her wand to attempt to pull the books nearest him down, but he shot her spell out of the air before it had come within ten feet of him.

"Your environment is currently of no use to you," he called, firing another spell as he advanced on her. "Does it feel very unfair, facing me at a terrible disadvantage? How frustrated does it make you, to know how vulnerable you are?"

She turned, throwing up a momentary shield behind her, and ran, sprinting from the volley of light spiralling after her. She heard the squeal of her shield shattering seconds later as he gave chase, but she was faster—he had his knee to contend with—and she dropped out of sight to the lower level again as soon as the guardrail dropped to a height she could easily jump over. A Cushioning Charm softened her fall, and she rolled to her feet again quickly, sinking back into the shadows.

As soon as Severus realized she had vanished, the fireworks on the upper level halted. His footsteps were as silent as hers; she fought to stay still, to breathe quietly, to go unnoticed.

"I suppose it all felt very unfair," he said neutrally, coldly, as though it didn't matter to him. "The years of being bullied and taken advantage of by your so-called friends…the years of going unnoticed while you slowly fell apart…"

Her heartbeat had picked up; it was hard to breathe normally. The fear had begun to recede as her pulse quickened with anger, rising from the lingering feeling of injustice.

"Your lover ignored the signs and sought comfort elsewhere—your best friend lifted not a finger to uncover your pain—"

Her grip on her wand was painfully tight. She tried to choke down the rising rage to no avail.

"Even the person who ought to have known—the person who knew the symptoms best—cast you aside. After years of defending him—after saving his life—he abandoned you in your darkest hour."

His voice was very close, now. She burned with the desire to attack, warred with the impulse to stay hidden, to let her anger burn itself out.

"All these people, treating you with nothing but silence…what must that say about you?" His voice sneered now; he jeered at her, and it was not the Severus she had come to know, but the Snape who tormented her during her schooldays. "You've lain down and allowed it for so long—tolerated their cruelty and neglect—you must believe you're worth as little as they imply—"

Hermione caught sight of his movement, and something inside her broke, releasing the fury she had been long building within. Her spell—forceful, carnal, nothing she had ever cast before, nothing _recognizable _to her—burst forward and shattered his permanent shield; it fell, burning, around his feet. He wheeled to meet her next attack.

"How could they?" she screamed, the force of her voice tearing up her throat, and her next spell blasted him backward into a bookshelf. "How could they not see—how could they not _notice_—how could the Ministry cover all this up—how could they _strand _me like this—I'm not worthless!" He laughed, cruelly, but the force of her next spell silenced him. "_I'm not worthless_!" Her voice burned.

She advanced on Severus, but he didn't retreat, standing his ground amidst the slow spill of books shattered from the spell that had protected them. The rage flooding her felt like power, and she could barely think of forming a shield like his before it had appeared; she clothed herself with it, protected herself inside it. The jets of light absorbed on impact and seconds later, he stopped firing, realizing what had happened.

"And how could you?" she cried, another spell blowing a hole in the bookshelf just to the right of his ear and leaving a smoking crater in the stone beneath. "_How could you?_ Seeing what I was going through—noticing the symptoms—and not saying a word! Seven years—you let me _drown _in my own agony for seven years because you hated me for keeping you alive—you were the only person, the only living soul who could help me, and you had a whole damn year, and you did _nothing_!"

He barely deflected her onslaught of curses. His attempt to disarm her was quickly repelled, and seconds later, his wand flew from his hand; she snatched it out of the air and held her own to his throat. His gaze was strangely calm as he looked down at her.

"How could you?" she demanded, her voice returned to normal volume, but hoarse. Her pulse roared in her ears; she could scarcely hear herself speak. She trembled with fury. "I _needed _you, and you—you did nothing."

"I was selfish." His black eyes looked into hers, and his voice resonated in her mind, assuring her of his honesty. His remorse was thick, his regret nearly crippling; the feeling swept over her, leaving her breathless. "I was angry. I was petty and ungrateful. And I'm sorry—sorrier than you'll ever understand." Slowly, he lifted a hand to wrap around hers, and gently directed her wand to the ground. "I have allowed myself, for decades, to live in the state of mind I saw you in, and the fact that I ignored your suffering after all you had done for me is my greatest regret, my most hideous failure."

The energy didn't drain from her swiftly, as it had so many times before; instead, her rage quieted gradually. Her shield remained firmly in place, the current of it singing in her veins; she felt luminescent, even in the wake of her potent wrath, as if her power remained though the rage had receded.

* * *

><p>Only years of practice kept Severus breathing, steadily, evenly, as Hermione glowed before him.<p>

_Beautiful_, he thought blankly, transfixed by the colour in her cheeks.

"You are…" He stopped, swallowed hard, attempting to overcome the hoarse note in his voice. "You are a thing to behold when you have full control of your power."

He could only imagine the things he would do to her if he did not have full control of himself—devour the pink lips, run hands over her lovely curves, push her to her back on the table just feet away, take her amidst the wreckage of the battle he had lost—she drew a shuddering gasp and took a step closer—the heat of her body well within his grasp—

He swore vehemently and twisted away from her, releasing her hand, only to realize he was unsteady on his feet. The tension shifted in a moment, from breathless desire to sharp concern. "Severus?" she asked, as he gripped a still-intact bookshelf to steady himself.

"Congratulations," he spat, without any true animosity. "You have disarmed and concussed me."

"I'm so sorry—here—" She ducked beneath his arm, draping it around his shoulders; her arm wrapped around his waist, carefully supporting him. "Let's go to my quarters, I'll patch you up there." She pointed her wand behind them, and the bookshelf was repaired, books again standing in their rightful places, the smoking hole in the stone beneath carefully mended.

"I don't see why you're resisting, you know," she interjected quietly, when silence had lasted them halfway to her quarters.

"Resisting?" he repeated.

"Don't. Don't lie." She peered sideways up at him from beneath the weight of his arm. "We both felt it."

"I am _concussed_."

She rolled her eyes. It was insufferable, so like her, somewhat endearing—could he not control his thoughts at this particular instant? "You hit your head. You aren't concussed."

"You underestimate your magic," he replied darkly.

She brightened perceivably beside him, a beacon on the dark. "It was…it was all there."

"Yes," he answered, with a strange feeling like winter—heavy, annihilating, _cold_—in his chest. "Your magic is intact."

She glanced up at him, as if sensing the weight in his mind. "But…it wasn't there an hour ago. Not like that. I…that was _your shield_, Severus. I made _your shield_."

"I said it was intact, not that you could access it at will." He tried to lean away from her as she lowered the wards on her quarters, but her arm pressed firmly around him, forcing his weight onto her shoulders. "I'm _fine_," he gritted.

"I thought you were concussed," she said peevishly, and he relented, letting her support him through the door and into her sitting room, where she carefully lowered him to the couch. She touched the back of his head, and her fingers came away sticky with blood. "And maybe you are," she sighed, conjuring a bowl, water, and washcloth.

He clenched his jaw as she dabbed away the blood from his scalp, containing himself to absolute stillness.

"I wish you wouldn't," she said sadly, her voice quiet. "I know your…terms…but we don't need to pretend like this—in the meantime. You behave as if…" Her voice trailed off, but her conscious mind filled in the emptiness as she glanced briefly into his eyes. The moment in the clearing, evaporated, standing there alone, watching him walk away, no contact to be had, as if—

"It happened," he interrupted, mouth dry at the memory. "But your wellbeing is my priority at present. If my interference did further damage—if you were not allowed to heal first—you could not imagine the regret—"

She pressed her fingertips to his lips suddenly, without warning, and he stopped talking, stopped _breathing_, Salazar, what was _wrong _with him—

"It's more than that," she said quietly. "It's not all about _me_, Severus, it's about you, too. You're afraid. Afraid that you'll give in, and then, when I'm better, I won't want you anymore, because you think you're damaged beyond repair. You stupid git." She met his glare with one of her own, her brown eyes as fierce as they had been after their first duel. "We're all _damaged_. I'm not going to mend perfectly, either, I know that—I'm always going to have scars. That's no reason to just…stop living. You're not _inflicting_ anything on me, Severus. You're not interfering. You're _helping_, or can't you see that?"

He didn't reply—couldn't find the right words to contradict her. He basked in the shallows of her mind, her earnestness, her honesty, her fierce affection, that burning loyalty, it was for him, all for him—but there was something strange and frightened in her, now, as she stared back at him. She lifted her wand, and he automatically reached for his, only to realize it was on her coffee table, out of his reach.

"Just a diagnostic," she said quietly, and the wood twirled, and symbols appeared. "You were right…you _are _concussed." She hesitated, then plunged on. "You ought to stay here tonight, so I can keep an eye on you."

He caught her wrist as she made to stand. "What did you see?" he demanded roughly.

She hesitated, her eyes gleaming briefly with tears. "Your barriers are weak," she said, her voice low. "I've never been able to…go that deep…before—"

His head throbbed—a result of the concussion or her resistance to _answer the damn question_, he wasn't sure. "What did you see?" he pressed.

"Nothing specific," she said. "Just…the flavour of guilt, the persistent regret, the overwhelming tide of _loneliness_…" She closed her eyes; her voice ached. "It's so much deeper than what I feel, so much older—" She shook her head, as if waking herself from a reverie. "You're…You don't _have _to be. You don't have to be alone."

He closed his eyes as her fingertips brushed over his jaw, bled warmth into his skin. How did she do it? Turn him on himself, change the lesson that was supposed to be hers into an examination of him, instead.

"What is the alternative?" he asked roughly. "I have been—alone—for forty-five years, Hermione. I know nothing else."

"Let me show you," she said fiercely. "_Please_."

"And play patient to your pity?" he snapped, rising from the couch; she reached out a hand to steady him, but he knocked it aside. "I can think of nothing that would be more repulsive to me."

"You think—" She spluttered with outrage. "You think this is _pity_? How often have you been in my mind, and you haven't seen—don't you _know_—Severus, _look at me_."

He refused; if he looked into her bright brown eyes now, he would be trapped, cornered, and he couldn't bear the thought. He turned his back on her and swept from her sitting room, ignoring her plea for him to return. This was not a conversation he could have, not now—not when he was weak in his resolve to leave her alone while she healed—and he let her office door slam behind him, silencing her voice in his wake.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: My apologies for the long hiatus. Summer became busier than I thought possible. And I'm sorry for the cruelty of this chapter, but I've rewritten the last thousand words about a dozen times in the last week, and this was the version that rang truest.


	21. Renegotiations

TWENTY-ONE

_Renegotiations_

The staff of Hogwarts noticed an uncomfortable shift among their ranks in the days that followed.

It was observed by Professor Sprout that Professors Granger and Snape no longer sat side-by-side at mealtimes: Severus had returned to his solitary post at the very end of the High Table, Hermione to the place she had once frequently occupied beside Neville. Shortly thereafter, Professor Flitwick noticed that they no longer sought one another's company at weekly staff meetings, either, because Hermione had drawn him into a lengthy discussion on memory charms that Tuesday shortly after the meeting ended. Madam Hooch reported that their frequent strolls around the grounds of Hogwarts—once a prominent feature of the night landscape after they had made their rounds in the Forbidden Forest—had stopped, and that Professor Snape could instead be seen walking alone. Finally, Madam Pomfrey, who had once watched the comings-and-goings from Professor Snape's office with idle interest from her convenient lookout on the first floor, witnessed the halt of social calls made by Professor Granger to the Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor. In fact, the only time they were seen together—together, but still, somehow, apart, the space between them tangible—was during the hours of their assigned rounds.

"I don't understand," Pomona lamented to Minerva, when both Hermione and Severus had taken their separate leaves from the third weekly staff meeting tainted by their determination to ignore one another. "They were getting on so well!"

"Hermione won't even talk about it," Neville interjected, his features deeply unhappy.

"Nor will Severus, not that he has ever been particularly forthcoming," Minerva sighed.

"They must have had a row," Filius said soothingly. "They'll come around, won't they?"

But November bled into December, and they did not _come around_.

* * *

><p>Time passed slowly for Severus Snape. The hours spent in her presence during rounds passed slowest of all. They did not make eye contact, nor did they speak. Her mind remained closed to him, though he sensed, however distantly, her tense, rigid hold on her sadness.<p>

She had tried—for a full two weeks—to re-establish the closeness that he had somehow destroyed between them. She stopped asking for him to talk about why he had left, and instead—earnestly, painfully—ignored the incident entirely, tried to return to their state of being before that night. He did not respond; he was curt, short, unyielding, defensive; and by degrees, she gave up. She stopped sitting beside him at meals and staff meetings; she stopped knocking on his door on Friday evenings; she stopped talking while they patrolled. Eventually, she stopped even looking at him.

He remained certain that it was for the best. Though she grew a little paler, though the shadows under her eyes deepened slightly, she was not as before: she was alert, social, eating regularly, and teaching her classes with passion the Headmistress approved of—he overheard many conversations. She was, perhaps, having a more difficult time of recovering on her own, but she was still recovering. He had given her enough tools, taught her enough methods; she was brilliant and determined, and could implement them on her own. She didn't _need _him, and that was good. That was a relief.

His days stretched on slowly without her, though. The silence of his quarters pressed in on him over weekends he had once enjoyed alone, with books, coffee, and alcohol; he didn't take the same pleasure in his solitude that he once had, though he pressed on with grim determination to enjoy the privacy. He missed her bright voice, her occasional laughter, her earnestness—but she had given up, and that was for the best.

He didn't ask himself why he let the space between them languish; it seemed only natural. He had not only to protect her, but to protect himself—for what good could come of a short, bittersweet romance with a too-young witch? He would never be satisfied with so little—he had done all he could to create for himself a quiet life, a peaceful life, and she would destroy so easily what he had made with her interference—it was better to stop that absurd notion now, himself, than allow her to end it in a few short months. Even if she didn't believe it was pity, that was all it would amount to, in the end. He was old; he was irascible; he was damaged—what would Hermione Granger want with him? Only to do some ambiguous moral right, and he wanted no part in it.

The remaining flickers of his dreams—his nightmares of war, of living undercover, of fear—had abated, and now, he only dreamed (occasionally, infrequently, he told himself) of her: of dancing with her at the Masquerade Ball, of kissing her in a clearing, of sitting and playing chess with her, even of arguing with her. His life drifted forward, meaninglessly, and he dreamed of her asking him to be happy.

The students had returned home for the Christmas holidays when, one evening, while he wandered the corridors for the sake of wandering, he found the door to the Room of Requirement in place. A great deal of noise emitted from within—crashing, banging, the occasional shout of vicious triumph, and he recognized her voice.

His feet made the decision for him, while the logic in his mind uproariously told him not to enter; but he pushed open the enormous door, wand at the ready, and for a moment stood still on the threshold as the scene unfolded.

She glowed, a vision alight with her magic. The current of her shield—_his _shield—ran over her skin, vivid with power. Her back was to him, a line of defensive cover before her, and there, on the other side of the room, stood Harry Potter.

The Boy Who Lived fired curse after curse, and she ran, dodged, avoided, firing back whenever she saw an opening. There was something not quite right about Potter—he moved too mechanically, too slowly, for someone who had played Quidditch half his life—

Potter shifted and changed when one of Hermione's curses caught him directly in the chest, while Severus watched and realized that it was not actually Potter, but was, instead, the Room, providing an enemy for Hermione to face. The next shape it took was that of Ron Weasley, and she disarmed it a moment later, prompting it to shift and change again, into a tall man, with dark hair and black eyes…

Without thinking, he disarmed the creation wearing the mask of his own face; it was distracted by Hermione's movement, and crumbled into the floor of the room, as if aware it was no longer needed. Startled by the spell originating from behind her, she turned, wand raised on him before she had fully seen him. He wondered, fleetingly, how long she'd been here; her shirt was soaked with sweat, her hair wild with the humidity in the air.

Her features flickered with emotion, quick, each one trading out for another—shock, and then pain, and then a resurgence of the anger that had been driving her in battle just a moment before. "Leave," she snarled, raising her wand a fraction of an inch to point squarely at his chest.

He created his own shield just in time; she cast her first curse seconds later and vaulted to the other side of her makeshift barrier, putting it between them. He felt her rage in an instant; her mind was open, but there was nothing to discern there, only the tall, forceful gale of her fury, an anger that led her casting with precision.

"How did you get in?" she asked coldly, her wand still trained on him, unwavering.

"I saw the door; the Room was open," he returned, loosely defensive, watching her little movements with wariness. "I heard your voice, and I thought you might…"

"Need your help?" She laughed; there was no delight in the sound. Her wand lifted suddenly and pulled down the stone behind him, trying to bury him, and it distracted him enough that his shield flickered and died. He ducked, avoiding her next curse narrowly. "I don't need your help, _Snape_."

They ran; they circled one another; they ducked, and cast, and parried, and she slowly established the edge on him, running him down. He wondered how she had come so far, so quickly, since their first duel—or if, perhaps, he was too distracted to battle as he once had, or without the energy to do so—every bit of magic seemed to drain him more than he had already been drained, and he had, he realized, been drained before setting foot inside this room—he had been utterly exhausted…

She suddenly stopped short; a look of concern, of worry, flitted across her features, even as her wand raised for the blow that would disarm him, the blow he knew he wouldn't be able to repel. Her wall of rage was abruptly snuffed out, her mental activity suddenly very quiet. Her wand was still on him, but it appeared that she wouldn't cast another spell.

"Severus?" she asked uncertainly.

It was the first time he had heard his given name in three weeks, since she had last spoken it. It inflicted him with as much pain as joy; even now, she said it easily; it had been his surname that sounded wrong on her lips. He looked at her without thought, searching for the warmth in her golden-brown eyes, and then noticed the red.

"You're bleeding," he said, automatically taking a step toward her, but she flinched back even as she lowered her wand, looking away from him.

There was a wave of pain, a shudder of control, and she stared at the floor, acting as if he weren't there, her expression carefully blank.

"Hermione," he said, as gently as he could, and tried again to approach her. She stood stiff, immobile, as if carved out of stone—not keeping the distance between them, but not closing it, either.

"What do you want?" she said flatly, without the slightest inflection.

"You," he replied, his voice hoarse and barely audible, reaching out to just barely touch the cut on her cheekbone; it healed instantly, leaving only the smear of residual blood over unbroken skin.

Her head snapped up, her eyes met his, and the fierce brightness of how much she _hurt _burned into him.

"You can't do this," she said shakily, as if she hadn't heard him. "You can't just—come in and out of my life at will—there are _repercussions _for ignoring people for weeks—"

"Hermione—"

"You've never been so cruel," she said brokenly, and his guilt throbbed within him. "You wouldn't even _look _at me. I tried—I tried _everything_—I didn't say a damn thing to warrant you storming out like that, you interpreted what I was saying _all wrong_—"

"_Hermione_—"

"You wouldn't even let me finish! I was—I was _trying_—I'm sorry if I violated your bloody precious _terms_—I was just trying to be perfectly clear—"

"I know," he broke in, trying to halt the rising note of hysteria in her voice, "I know, Hermione, I know—"

"It was so terribly unfair of you!" She stared up into his face, her eyes glazed with unshed tears, her lip trembling. "You haven't said anything to me in a month that wasn't hurtful or snide or horrible. And then…you haven't spoken at all…in _weeks_…why would you do that? After everything—and all I was trying to say—"

But Severus didn't hear what she had been trying to say; black had started to creep into the corners of his vision, and he noted, too late, that it had been foolish of him to use a shield that required so much of his magic, foolish of him to duel her at all, when she had clearly grown strong while he had grown weak. His hand caught a nearby barrier, holding himself up for another precious few seconds, trying to hear her, but his ears were ringing, his consciousness draining from him like water from cupped hands.

* * *

><p>Severus woke to the soft, low crackling of a fire, the feeling of a warm, wet cloth cleaning the stinging wound on his forehead, and the furrowed brow of Hermione. She was displeased; it was all over her face. He reached up to grasp her hand, to stop her healing him, and her brown eyes snapped to his, the spark of anger still glowering in their depths.<p>

"What," he rasped, "are you doing?"

"Helping you," she said tartly, shaking off his hand. "But if you can't stand my presence, I can deliver you back to your own rooms."

He saw her anger falter as his own features twisted momentarily in pain, but then he turned his face away, breaking their gaze. Already, the ache in his chest was consuming him, grating his weak heart at the sight of her face; he wished, more than anything, to be gone, to have never entered the Room of Requirement.

She sighed and got heavily to her feet. "What did you bother coming in for?" she asked sadly. "If you weren't going to so much as talk to me…what was the point? To torture me? To torture yourself? You clearly need more of that, Severus. You haven't lost nearly enough of your health in the last month…"

The same feeling—half pleasure, half crippling pain—swept through him again at the sound of his name on her lips, and he shuddered in reaction. He heaved himself to a sitting position; he was sprawled on her couch, in her quarters. She must have taken pains to bring him here and go unnoticed.

"Don't you dare," she threatened, seeing him buttoning his shirt sleeves. "You aren't well, I don't care how angry you are with me, you're just going to have to stay here—"

"For fuck's sake," he snarled, rising from the couch; her mouth popped open and then snapped shut in shock. "Has it occurred to you, Hermione, that _you _are the one angry with _me_, not the other way around?"

Her lips had hardened into a thin line. "No," she spat. "No, it hadn't, seeing as I was the one who tried to get you to come around for bloody weeks, and _you _were the one snubbing _me_—"

"Did that truly present itself to you as anger?" he interrupted, glaring down at her, but she stood her ground, scowling back just as fiercely. "Am I not much more direct—much more _obvious_—when I am angry?"

"What were you, then?" she demanded. "If you weren't angry, then, what were you? I must have replayed our last real conversation a hundred times, and I've yet to salvage any meaning from it that wasn't tied into your being furious with me for an absolutely stupid reason—"

"It was a rather legitimate reason," he returned coldly, "though my reaction to it has not lasted nearly so long as yours."

"Legitimate?" Her voice rose with every syllable. "Name your _legitimate reason_, Snape. Name one good reason you had any right to be angry with me, even for a fraction of a second!"

"You _pity _me," he said flatly. "You, in all your Gryffindor righteousness, see me as your next pet project—"

"And you, in all your Slytherin wariness, are incapable of seeing that _pity _has never directed my hand to help you!" Her cheeks were flushed pink, her eyes sparkling with fury. "I saved your life in the Shrieking Shack because I admired and respected you; I sought your company because you made me happy, because your friendship helped me recover; I tried to ease your loneliness not out of some ambiguous desire to forever be a do-gooder, but because of my rather specific desire for _you_." She stared up at him, and he became suddenly aware of how close they were, within a foot of one another, close enough for him to feel her breath, fast and hard, on his skin. "I wouldn't give a damn if you didn't feel the same for me if you actually believed in the source of my motivation—if you would just stop lying to yourself, if you would just trust me when I say that _I'm in love with you_!"

Severus could wait no longer; he had starved himself of her presence, her voice, her touch, for too long, and he was weak, too weak to resist her insistence, her genuine ferocity of feeling. She was too close and still, somehow, too far; he tightened his arm around her waist and pulled her roughly to him. She had time only to emit a squeak of surprise before his free hand tangled in her hair and his mouth descended on hers, ravenous, demanding. Instantly, she yielded, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him deeper into the kiss. The warmth that swept through him at her touch very nearly burned him; he was drowning in her, the feeling of her hair wrapped around his fingers and her supple body pressed against him, the pressure of her fingertips on the back of his neck and her soft lips moving against his own.

"Wait," she mumbled against his mouth, trying to pull back, "what about your bloody precious terms—"

"Forget them," he said hoarsely.

"What about the last four weeks—"

"I'm sorry," he said, staring at the lips swollen with his kiss, "but you know that I will be difficult—that I will make you angry—that I am _not whole _and so behave—"

"—like a stupid git," she finished for him, her eyes suddenly sparkling with tears. "How has no one ever seen what I see, all the people who have treated you ill—"

He chuckled darkly. "Because you have a very strange perception of things, Hermione." His hands framed her face, and as he looked down at her, he felt both strangely wild with happiness and disconcerted by her.

"If you weren't angry—"

"I was," he interrupted, "at first—but then—I saw an opportunity to save you from this ridiculous idea of yours—to re-establish my solitude—for us to go our separate, safer ways—"

"Was it nice?" she probed, her voice raw.

"What?" he asked blankly.

"The solitude."

He stared at her, wondering at how she couldn't see in his face how miserable it had been. "Does it appear to you, Hermione, that I enjoyed it?" he inquired. "I wanted to—I pretended I did—but I missed your constant chatter, your kindness, your brilliant mind—instead I have tolerated the many inquiries of the dismayed Headmistress—"

She choked out a laugh. "So what were you? If not angry, then—"

"Defensive, afraid," he answered. "Afraid that you did not know what you were asking for, that you did not know me well enough to make such a request, that your own kind heart would expose you to the blackness of mine…and determined; determined that I could prevent such a situation from ever occurring—that I—"

"—could go on, alone, forever?" she finished.

"And you could move on, healthy, and happy—live a better life than the one you would pursue with me—"

"No," she said, shaking her head, "no, you see—that is not a normal person's response to heartbreak." Her voice shook. "Eventually, maybe, I suppose, but—when I say that I love you, I mean that I don't want to be without you, and that life, without your company, is duller, less interesting, and it's worth standing here pleading my case with you, whatever the humiliating outcome, for the chance that you would stay. I wouldn't just—_go on_—unchanged by the time we spent as friends, as something more—"

"Humiliating?" he repeated, alarmed.

"Yes, humiliating—I know that you remember the feeling. Put yourself in my place." Her voice wobbled, and she swallowed, as if trying to steady it. "After everything I said to you in the Forbidden Forest—after everything that we'd been through together—to be rejected so callously—yes…humiliating."

"But you must have known—"

"Known what?" she asked tiredly. "I didn't know anything for certain. The only facts I had pointed to the conclusion that, no matter what you'd said or done before, you wanted nothing more to do with me—and whatever I imagined, I couldn't bring myself to hope for something better than that grim outcome."

They were quiet a moment; he struggled to absorb her despair at his absence, and she was silent while his mind spun.

"I am truly sorry," he said finally, his voice strained. "It was never my intention to humiliate you—if only you had known…"

"Known what?" she said again; she lifted her hands from her sides and pressed her palms to his chest.

"I wanted nothing more to do with you, that's true, but not because I didn't want _you_; do you understand?"

She regarded him with irritation. "You have a very cryptic way of saying what you mean, Severus."

His lips twitched up in the ghost of a smirk. "Did you expect anything less?"

She smiled tremulously up at him in answer and slid her hands up to his shoulders; he wrapped his own around her hips, and she sighed in response to his touch.

"You know that I'll be difficult," he reminded her, aware of his crumbling defences, needing to tell her one last time. "You know that I'll make you angry—"

"Furious," she smiled.

"—you know that I'll upset you—"

"You'll at least feel horrid afterwards," she said.

"—you know that you don't know everything about me—"

"But I hope to," she breathed, her lips bare inches from his, and it was as if she had both taken his meaning and deliberately misinterpreted it, twisted it to be something better, something more. His heart pounded as she settled in his arms, and her eyes, so alive with affection—with _want_—gazed into his.

He could wait no longer; Severus Snape was a man not meant for a quiet life. He gave in, pressing her to him with a searing kiss, and went on drowning.

* * *

><p>Anyone who had assumed that Severus was not a man of passion—that his cold exterior somehow indicated that he was indifferent through and through—was profoundly incorrect. Hermione had known it before, had seen it in their many debates and arguments, had tasted it in the Forbidden Forest, but this was more compelling evidence entirely.<p>

When her lips were quite thoroughly bruised from his attentions, his fingers gently curled in her hair and pulled her head back, exposing her throat to his mouth. She shuddered with pleasure as he pressed a warm kiss to her neck, then dragged his lips down toward her collarbone, where he met her shirt; she remembered abruptly that she was still in the soaked-through old clothes she had worn to duel in, and reflected hazily that that seemed very long ago, now.

"Severus," she gasped out, as his teeth nipped at the crook of her shoulder, "I'm—covered in sweat—perhaps I should have a shower, before…"

He gave an exasperated snort against her skin; she shivered a second time. "Do I appear to be in a patient mood?" he growled.

"I only meant—I must smell awful—"

"On the contrary," he said, and she felt the impressive nose inhale against her flesh, "you smell as lovely as usual. Apples," he murmured, "vanilla…" His lips captured her earlobe and gently sucked; she gasped, then emitted a surprised squeak as he swiftly ducked and knocked her legs from beneath her, straightening up again with her in his arms.

"You shouldn't," she protested as he manoeuvred them between the couch and coffee table. "You're still weak."

"Magically, perhaps, but not physically. You patched me up admirably, witch."

She had her doubts, but, sensing that he was—in his own way—trying to be romantic, she kept them to herself. He nudged open the door to her bedroom with his foot and halted on the threshold, surveying the space with clear amusement. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks.

"What did you expect?" she asked heatedly. "Scarlet and gold?"

He set her on her feet again. "Perhaps not," he allowed. "Nor did I expect green."

"I like green," she said defensively.

"Yes," he said, smirking down at her. "I remember the dress."

Then his mouth was pressed to hers again, and all thoughts of the décor forgotten. His hands caressed her—her shoulder blades to the curve of her lower back, and then over the swell of her hips, only to pause and return there, his fingers gently digging into her soft flesh. She whimpered at the sensation, unable to repress the sudden wave of lust that filled her; his tongue slipped against her lips, deepening their kiss. His hands slipped up from her hips to curl around the hem of her shirt.

"Wait," she mumbled against his mouth, the shock of realization waking her from the haze of desire.

He pulled back, stiffening for an instant, until her eyes met his, and a flash of understanding crossed his features. Taking her hand, he turned her palm face-up, exposing the scar on her forearm. She froze, her eyes on his, and he lowered his mouth, very slowly, to softly kiss the letters.

"I am, every inch, scarred," he reminded her quietly, echoing his words in the Forbidden Forest. "I see your scars for what they are—tokens of courage, a reflection of your powerful spirit."

"I have…"

"More; I know." Before she could protest further, he lifted her shirt over her head. "I am familiar with these," he murmured, tracing fingertips over the whip-like scars wrapped around her ribs and chest. "I treated you myself, after the Department of Mysteries; Madam Pomfrey is an adept Healer, but this was made with dark magic, and Dumbledore requested my involvement." Gently, he turned her to face away from him, caressed the raised ridges that flowed like vines over her shoulder blades. "From the night on the Astronomy Tower, when you disobeyed a direct order to care for Professor Flitwick in order to join the battle with your friends." He pressed her back against him, his hand splayed over her stomach, his voice low in her ear. "Courage—bravery. A touch of recklessness. You are, I daresay, the very best of your House…"

Her eyes fluttered closed as his attentions returned to her neck, his lips and tongue sucking and laving her sensitive skin. Another groan escaped her lips. His hand slid up her stomach, her ribs, to caress her breast through the fabric of her bra, squeezing and brushing teasing fingertips over a stiffening nipple. Her back arched against his chest, squirming to have more contact with his long fingers. His teeth nipped sharply at her neck—a reprieve for her impatience—and she struggled to comply.

"Are you on the potion?" he questioned softly, his teeth now grazing her earlobe.

"Yes," she gasped, shuddering, but his inquiry tripped another question in her mind; before she could decide whether or not to ask, he answered.

"No, I am not." Something dark flickered through his deep voice. "But I have been celibate a long while."

"Do you have a window in the back of my skull?" she demanded, breathless from his continuing touch.

"Your mind is very open at present," he murmured, turning her to face him again; her hands leapt swiftly to the buttons on his shirt. "I've missed it…you possess a very genuine warmth, even in your thoughts."

She pressed her lips to the base of his throat, now exposed by the top of his unbuttoned shirt, and felt him shiver. Her fingers worked nimbly through the rest of the buttons and finally, she pushed the fabric from his shoulders entirely. He was self-conscious under his gaze, undoubtedly aware of the grief that swept through her when she touched the first of the many scars that lined his lightly-muscled torso. "Oh, Severus," she said softly, her fingertips caressing the ridges of raised flesh. "How on Earth could you have so many?"

He shrugged, his discomfort tangible. "My father—the Dark Lord—those two alone composed the majority."

She kissed the ropy scar that crossed over his shoulder and collarbone, then lifted her fingertips to the slashes she had once repaired, the wounds left by a snake's bite. He closed his eyes, jaw tight, but she pressed her lips there, too, and he inhaled sharply, his grip on her hip suddenly tightening. "Hermione—you don't have to—"

"Shh," she hushed him, and a hoarse groan spilled from his throat at her breath against his neck, the sensitive flesh of his scars. "You may be scarred, every inch, but you're beautiful every inch, too."

Her lips caressed the column of his throat; she inhaled his scent, like pine and sandalwood, and felt dizzy with intoxication. His free hand found the catch of her bra and undid it. She let it fall from her shoulders to the floor and his head dipped to kiss her again, more demanding now, his hands stroking over her bare skin, his body pushing hers back, back, back, until the backs of her thighs nudged gently into her bed. His arms wrapped around her legs to lift her to the mattress, and then he began to dispose of the rest of her clothing: pulling her trainers and socks off her feet, slipping the button of her slacks loose, tugging them slowly over her hips, until she was left in knickers under his heated gaze.

He leaned over her, cupping his hands around her bare breasts while his hips pressed firmly between her legs. She moaned at the contact and the burst of pleasure it wrung from her throbbing centre. "Lay back," he murmured against her lips, and she obeyed mindlessly as his fingers and then tongue slowly stroked her breasts. She gasped when he drew one of her nipples into his mouth and gently sucked; she felt him hardening against her core as he teased her, but then the pressure was gone as he sank down her body and knelt on the floor, draping her legs over his shoulders.

"What," she began, then "_oh_," she groaned as his tongue lapped over the fabric of her knickers, hinting at the warm pleasure that was soon to follow. He proceeded slowly, alert to her reactions, sucking and biting her inner thighs, occasionally teasing her with the pressure of his tongue on her aching centre. "Severus," she moaned in frustration, and he chuckled from between her legs.

"Impatient," he said, but pulled her knickers down her legs and resumed his position.

His tongue swept gently, softly, over her clit. She moaned and felt him shudder between her legs as he received the wave of pleasure from her mind; he repeated the motion slowly, his hands wrapped around her thighs. Her arousal deepened, blanketing her mind with powerful lust. He freed one hand to circle her opening with a fingertip. Her heart thudded against her ribs at the combined sensation. A strange, keening cry was filling the room, and she realized belatedly that it came from her. He slipped two fingers inside her and began slowly to thrust them in and out while his tongue deepened its pressure on her clit.

"Severus," she panted, her back arching against her bed, her hips beginning to meet the thrusts of his fingers and tongue. Her voice rose higher, and finally, she came with a wordless cry, her entire body stiffening with pleasure.

When she opened her eyes a moment later, she was aware of his absolute, utter stillness, his breath coming in hard bursts. "Severus?" she asked, concerned, and leaned up on her elbows, beginning to reach for him.

"Wait," he said tersely, his eyes closed; after a moment under her worried gaze, they slowly reopened, and she felt his shoulders relax.

"What's wrong?" she asked, moving to sit up as he rose again to his feet.

"Your…arousal…" His jaw clenched momentarily. "Your pleasure taxed my self-control; the feeling…" He closed his dark eyes, heavily dilated, as if savouring the recent memory; she reached out to undo his belt, slipped the button of his trousers loose, and tugged down the zipper before ridding him of pants and briefs entirely. His cock, entirely hardened, stood up from a dark thatch of pubic hair, and she wrapped her hand around his length to stroke him gently.

His hand fell to halt her progress; she looked up, questioning, to see his black eyes burning down at her. "I wouldn't last," he said, voice ragged.

She laced her fingers through his and tugged, urging him onto the bed with her, and leaned forward to kiss him, then pushed him back against the pillows. She smiled briefly at his irritated expression, which changed swiftly when she straddled his lap. His back straightened against the headboard, and his hands curved around her waist. She reached beneath her to stroke the head of his cock against her wetness; he groaned, and then she sank down, down, down, until he filled her fully.

For a moment she remained there while they gazed at one another, breathing heavily, and then, his hands running over her, she began to move, stroking slowly up and down his length. "Hermione," he rasped, thrusting his hips up to meet her strokes. She braced her hands on his shoulders and his lips nuzzled her breasts, licking and kissing and sucking her skin while she pressed him into her, deeper with every stroke downward. His hands urged her on, forcing her hips down faster and harder, until she felt the edge approaching again.

"Severus…please, _please_…"

He shattered at the sound of her voice, grinding up into her with abandon, and as his pleasure enveloped her she, too, broke, shuddering around him as her climax gripped her. When she opened her eyes again, he was gazing up at her, utterly tranquil, his features softer and more peaceful than she had ever seen them.

* * *

><p>Professors Snape and Granger went missing for a full three days.<p>

Neither appeared at the High Table for breakfast, lunch, or dinner on the second, third, and fourth day of the Christmas holidays. On the third day, they missed a scheduled night of rounds, but as no students remained at the school, the Headmistress saw no need to contact either professor yet. Just when the Headmistress feared she would need to make an inquiry which would lead to the discovery of a murder, they reappeared at dinner on the fifth day, entering the Great Hall together. Professor Granger was caught in the act of beaming up at the Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor; Professor Snape smirked in return before noticing the many stares of the staff and re-adopting a stoic demeanour. Though Hermione attempted to do the same, she failed brilliantly, and broke down in quiet laughter. The corner of Severus's mouth twitched.

They seated themselves, side-by-side, across from Minerva, where the only seats left awaited them. She sighed, cast a severe look at the pair of them, and straightened her hat. Severus returned her look with a raised eyebrow.

"It's about bloody time!" Neville exclaimed with exasperation, and didn't even quail from the dark look Severus cast his way.

* * *

><p><span>AUTHOR'S NOTE<span>: Well, there you have it, folks! This story is by no means over, but we've all been waiting on that bit for quite a while. ;) Also, for the curious, this story can also be found on ashwinder dot sycophanthex dot com-my author name there is lilypetals.


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